Access non-local resources via SSH/SFTP

[gian-didom]

From Pkl documentation, it seems that it is possible to access a non-local resources with an HTTP(S) URL.
I'm using Pkl to setup a distributed local environment, in which the machines do not have a running HTTP(S) server; instead, they all have an SSH and SFTP server.

I think it could be a great addition to use URLs such as ssh://remote-hostname/path/to/file.pkl or sftp://remote-hostname/path/to/file.pkl to automatically load remote resources without complex setups. I think that this is currently achievable by using some kind of filesystem mounting, but maybe there could be a more elegant way to achieve this.

EDIT: At https://github.com/gian-didom/pkl-ssh/tree/sftp there's a version that uses Apache MINA SSH library to add support for SFTP.
It works well; however, it could be more elegant to only provide an SFTP filesystem provider and leave everything else as-is. Also, I wasn't able to generate native images due to linking and initialization errors.

[gian-didom]

I was able to spin-up an implementation of SSH file access via ssh:// protocol using JSch. For now, I only enable key-based access since I don't think that pushing users to use the password is a good idea.

Do you think it I should submit a pull request?

[holzensp]

For such things to land in Pkl itself, they must be quite well-rounded (i.e. cover everything people can reasonably expect to be covered when they read ssh: URIs). As it seems you've already done quite a bit of work to make it concrete, I'd suggest putting up a SPICE (see here) and inviting some feedback from the community.

Mind you, this does not strictly need to be covered in Pkl itself, because Pkl has SPIs for custom Resource Readers (see here and here) and ModuleKeys (see here). The latter (ModuleKeys) are what you seem to be looking for (because import). These SPIs are also available in our language bindings, so it need to even be in Java.

[holzensp]

Oh, and then I totally forget to mention: Cool! ;)