Clever Tools 4.7: SSH remote commands, improved drains and backup downloads

Clever Tools 4.7.0 is available. This release enhances SSH with remote command execution and interactive instance selection, improves drain monitoring and fixes database backup downloads.

SSH remote command execution

You can now execute a single command on a running instance with the new --command (or -c) option. The command runs in a login shell and exits immediately, making it convenient for quick diagnostics, scripting or automation.

# List application files
clever ssh -c 'ls -lah $APP_HOME'

# Inspect application environment variables
clever ssh -c "env | sort"

# Read application logs
clever ssh -c "journalctl -u bas-deploy.service --no-pager -n 50"

This also enables AI coding assistants (Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, OpenCode…) to inspect the state of a running instance, analyse configuration files, check logs or troubleshoot issues on your behalf.

Interactive instance selection

When multiple instances are running, clever ssh now displays an interactive selection prompt instead of a numbered list. This provides a more intuitive experience when choosing which instance to connect to.

clever ssh
> ? Select an instance:
> ❯ Sleepy Ponita - Instance 0 - UP (11281f38-...)
>   Tense Caterpie - Instance 1 - UP (b10d19d9-...)

Improved drain monitoring

The clever drain and clever drain get commands now display message rates and throughput with dynamic units (messages/hour, messages/minute, messages/second, KiB/second, MiB/second) that adapt to the actual values. Retry information is also shown, including attempt count, last and next attempt timestamps, helping you troubleshoot delivery issues more effectively.

Bug fixes

• Database backup downloads now use Node.js stream pipelines, fixing backpressure issues that could cause incomplete downloads on large backups.
• Detached HEAD deployments are now handled correctly when using the system Git feature, fixing failures that occurred when deploying from a detached HEAD state.

How to upgrade

To upgrade Clever Tools, use your favourite package manager. For example with npm:

npm update -g clever-tools
clever version