Pulse

Pulse is a modern Node.js / TypeScript wrapper around the system scp command.

It does not implement SSH, SFTP, or SCP protocols. Pulse delegates transfer work to the local OpenSSH scp binary and adds a cleaner terminal experience around it: start time, elapsed time, server identity, speed, ETA, progress, and structured errors.

Install

npm install -g pulse-scp

After installing globally:

pulse ./app.jar [email protected]:/data/app.jar
pulse [email protected]:/data/app.jar ./app.jar

You can also run it without a global install:

npx pulse-scp ./app.jar [email protected]:/data/app.jar

Usage

Upload:

pulse ./app.jar prod:/data/app.jar

Download:

pulse prod:/data/app.jar ./app.jar

Options:

pulse SOURCE TARGET \
  --port 22 \
  --identity ~/.ssh/id_rsa \
  --recursive \
  --verbose \
  --dry-run \
  --json \
  --no-color

Development

npm install
npm run typecheck
npm run build
npm run dev -- ./app.jar prod:/data/app.jar --dry-run

Architecture

• src/cli.ts: Commander-based CLI entry.
• src/index.tsx: runtime orchestration and JSON/UI mode selection.
• src/scpRunner.ts: system scp execution inside a pseudo terminal, live output parsing, lifecycle events, Ctrl+C handling.
• src/parser.ts: OpenSSH scp progress parsing, including carriage-return progress chunks.
• src/sshConfig.ts: minimal ~/.ssh/config host lookup for display metadata.
• src/ui.tsx: Ink terminal UI.
• src/types.ts: shared domain types.
• src/utils.ts: path inference, formatting, error classification.

Notes

Pulse keeps scp compatibility by passing the original source and target to the system binary. It runs scp inside a pseudo terminal via node-pty, with a system script fallback for environments where native PTY spawning is restricted. OpenSSH only emits its live carriage-return progress UI when it believes it is attached to a TTY. SSH aliases such as prod:/data/app.jar are resolved only for display; the real transfer still uses the user-provided scp arguments.