A shell in the chat app

01 / What it was

We wanted to reach the workstation from a phone without opening ports or using SSH. There is an open-source project for this, remoteDiscordShell, by another developer. We tried it, then wrote a smaller, stricter bot to replace it.

You type a command in one chat channel, the bot runs it on the machine and posts the output back.

02 / How it worked

• Only a fixed list of user accounts may run commands. There is no password login.
• No sudo, no package installs, no system updates. The bot never raises its own rights.
• The channel is matched by its ID, not its name.
• Commands time out after 120 seconds and their output is capped. Every command is logged.
• A few built-in commands: help, current folder, running process, stop, and fetching a file, with a list of protected paths checked on the real path.

03 / What we saw

Writing it made the limits clear. The code says its deny list is 'a guardrail against fat fingers, NOT a security boundary'. The log shows it was used about twenty times over ten days.

04 / Where it led

Reaching the machine from the phone moved on to voice control of the chat app in October.

Sources

1. Bot source. shell bot source, 20 Sep 2026 the shell bot: a small, allowlisted remote shell for this workstation.
2. Bot source. shell bot source, 20 Sep 2026 The shell deny list is a guardrail against fat fingers, NOT a security boundary
3. remoteDiscordShell (third-party project we tried). github.com/EnriqueMoran/remoteDiscordShell remoteDiscordShell is a remote shell for Linux that makes use of Discord's conection to send commands