ConnectBot is a Secure Shell client for Android that lets you connect to remote servers over a cryptographically secure link.
The easiest way to get ConnectBot is to install from Google Play Store. If you have installed from a downloaded APK, Google Play Store can upgrade your installed version to the latest version. However, once it has upgraded you can't install a version from the releases on GitHub anymore (due to key rotation that upgrades the package signature to a more secure algorithm).
ConnectBot can be downloaded from releases on GitHub. There are two versions:
google— for a version that uses Google Play Services to handle upgrading the cryptography provideross— includes the cryptography provider in the APK which increases its size by a few megabytes.
The ConnectBot app that uses two other libraries to provide its functionality:
- ConnectBot Terminal — the terminal emulator used by the app is also created and maintained by the ConnectBot author, Kenny Root.
- ConnectBot fork of Trilead SSH-2 — a heavily modified fork of the original Trilead SSH-2 Java library written by Christian Plattner.
ConnectBot is most easily developed in Android Studio. You can import this project directly from its project creation screen by importing from the GitHub URL.
To compile ConnectBot using gradlew, you must first specify where your
Android SDK is via the ANDROID_SDK_HOME environment variable. Then
you can invoke the Gradle wrapper to build:
./gradlew buildConnectBot uses GitHub Actions
for continuous integration. The workflow is defined in
.github/workflows/ci.yml.
In general, simply running ./gradlew build should cover all the
checks run in the GitHub Actions continuous integration workflow, but you can
run GitHub Actions workflows locally using nektos/act.
This requires Docker to be installed and running.
To run the main CI workflow (ci.yml):
act -W .github/workflows/ci.yml