HTML code to open PuTTY client from browser

Question

I am trying to make a webpage which will have the entire inventory of servers that our team manages in the form of a table. I am using a simple LAMP stack and the inventory input as a CSV file.

The table has three columns: Hostname, IP address and device serial number.

While this works perfectly fine, I want to take this a step further and make every IP address in the table a hyperlink, clicking which will open an SSH client, which will connect to that IP address. Any cues to how this can be done? I was hoping there would be something like the the mailto: tag which opens an email client (Outlook window).

Answer 1

I've done it following the info of this blog post.

For future reference in case the original page becomes missing, here is the process:

1. you cannot directly map the ssh:// scheme to PuTTY, but you can map it to an intermediary script which will in turn launch PuTTY with the right arguments. Mine is called putty_ssh.bat and has the following content:

   @echo off
   set var=%1
   set extract=%var:~6,-1%
   start "C:\Program Files (x86)\PuTTY\putty.exe" %extract%
   

2. the script has to be registered in the registry. You can just create a ssh.reg file with the following content and open it (customizing last line as needed):

   REGEDIT4
   [HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\ssh]
   @="URL:ssh Protocol"
   "URL Protocol"=""
   [HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\ssh\shell]
   [HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\ssh\shell\open]
   [HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\ssh\shell\open\command]
   @="\"C:\\path\\to\\putty_ssh.bat\" %1"
   

When I click on ssh:// links in web pages, it now opens PuTTY.