Flutter Server Box

Flutter Server Box (package name server_box, branded "ServerBox") is a cross-platform client for monitoring and administering remote servers. It packages what would normally require a desktop SSH workstation — a terminal, SFTP browser, live system telemetry, and container / service management — into a single Flutter codebase that ships to iOS, Android, macOS, Linux, and Windows. Despite the name it is not a headless server itself; it is the console you keep open while your Linux VPS, NAS, Raspberry Pi, or shared hosting box does its work.

Why it matters

• Truly cross-platform admin surface. The same app runs on a phone, a tablet, a MacBook, and a Linux desktop, with the watchOS companion app providing at-a-glance status from the wrist. For an operator who needs to ssh into a flaky VPS from a phone while away from a laptop, that is a meaningfully better experience than juggling Termux and a separate status app.
• Real telemetry, not just a terminal. ServerBox renders live charts for CPU, sensors (temperature, fan, voltage via lm_sensors), GPU (parsed from nvidia-smi XML), network, disk, and S.M.A.R.T. health, plus a Docker / process / systemd manager. The information sources are standard CLI tools on the host, so a vanilla Ubuntu or Raspberry Pi OS install is enough — no proprietary agent is required for the core features.
• Optional companion agent unlocks background features. A small standalone binary called ServerBoxMonitor is published separately and installed on the managed host. With it in place, the app gains server-push notifications (alerts fired server-side rather than on a client poll) and home-screen widgets that refresh in the background. Without it, ServerBox is still fully functional on demand; with it, the app behaves more like a passive monitoring dashboard.

How it works

The Flutter client holds server credentials locally and talks to each host over a single SSH session. The SSH layer is dartssh2 (vendored in the repo as packages/dartssh2), which implements the SSH2 protocol natively in Dart — there is no shell-out to ssh or paramiko, so the same code path runs on every platform including iOS where shelling out would be blocked. The terminal view is a vendored xterm package, and the embedded terminal is the same xterm.js-derived widget TerminalStudio publishes, fed live bytes from a dartssh2 channel.

State management is Riverpod 3 with code generation (riverpod_generator, riverpod_annotation), persistence uses hive_ce for local server profiles, and the build pipeline is a custom Dart script dart run fl_build -p PLATFORM (defined in fl_build/) that wraps flutter build per platform. i18n runs through Flutter's standard intl + ARB pipeline, with English, Simplified and Traditional Chinese, German, French, Dutch, Indonesian, Turkish, and Ukrainian hand-maintained and a long tail of auto-generated locales. Charts use fl_chart for the standard line/area series and a custom circle_chart for the at-a-glance ring gauges on the server detail screen.

The repo also contains a small watch_connectivity package that bridges to the watchOS app, and a plain_notification_token package that powers home-screen widget refresh on Android without depending on Firebase.

Caveats

• AGPL-3.0. The license is copyleft: redistributing the app binary obliges you to publish your modifications. Acceptable for personal and internal use; for a branded commercial fork you will either keep the source open or negotiate separately.
• No built-in web UI. ServerBox is a native client only. If you need a browser-based console for the same fleet, you are looking at a different project (e.g. a self-hosted shellhub or apache guacamole).
• Credentials are stored locally. Server profiles and SSH keys live in app-local Hive storage, with optional biometric lock on supported devices. There is no central team / shared vault primitive — this is a personal sysadmin tool, not an enterprise PAM replacement.
• ServerBoxMonitor is a separate repo. Treat the optional companion agent as a different dependency with its own release cadence; the two projects version independently and not every release of the Flutter app is tested against every release of the monitor.

Deployment notes

The client ships through the usual consumer channels; there is no self-hosted "server" to install.

# Mobile and desktop installers
# iOS / macOS: App Store
# macOS also: brew install --cask server-box
# Android: F-Droid, OpenAPK, GitHub Releases, or the project's CDN
# Linux / Windows: GitHub Releases or CDN (AppImage / portable .zip)

# Build from source (requires Flutter >= 3.11 with Dart >= 3.44)
git clone https://github.com/lollipopkit/flutter_server_box.git
cd flutter_server_box
flutter pub get
dart run build_runner build --delete-conflicting-outputs
flutter run -d <device>           # or:
dart run fl_build -p android      # android / ios / macos / linux / windows

On the managed host, the only requirement is a reachable SSH daemon and the standard CLI tools ServerBox queries (uptime, ps, systemctl, docker, smartctl, nvidia-smi, sensors, cat /proc/...). For the optional background-push and home-widget features, install ServerBoxMonitor on the host and point the client at it.

Integration tip: if you maintain a directory like this one and want a working "SSH-based fleet management" example, ServerBox is a good reference for a Flutter app that wraps a non-HTTP protocol (dartssh2 over a Dart socket) and surfaces structured data from remote shells — the lib/data/model/server/ + per-status provider split in lib/view/page/server/ is a clean pattern for turning parsed stdout into typed Riverpod state on every platform from one codebase.