Open a Terminal on a Device

Open a live terminal session directly from the octoja web interface and run commands on any connected device — no VPN or extra tools required.

Written By Erdinc Akay

Last updated 26 days ago

Open a live terminal session directly from the octoja web interface and run commands on any connected device — no VPN or separate remote access tool required.

Prerequisites

  • The device must be online (agent connected).

  • Your user account must belong to a group that grants the Terminal device action for the target device. Set this under Administration → Groups: open the group, go to its Device Access tab, and enable Terminal under Allowed actions.

Steps

  1. Go to Devices and click the device you want to access.

  2. On the device detail page, click the terminal icon button in the top-right toolbar (the button is icon-only — hover it to see the Terminal tooltip). octoja opens a new browser window titled Toolbox — <device name> with the Terminal tab active.

  3. octoja detects the shells available on the device and selects one automatically. The shell prompt appears in the Terminal tab within a few seconds.

  4. To open a different shell, click the + (New Tab) button next to the tab strip, expand Terminal, and pick another option (for example, switch between cmd, powershell, pwsh, bash, or zsh). Each shell opens as a new tab in the same Toolbox window.

  5. Type commands in the active tab as normal. Output appears in real time.

  6. To close a session, click the × on its tab. Closing the last tab closes the Toolbox window.

The Toolbox window also hosts File Explorer, Registry Editor, Event Log, Remote Desktop, and Storage Analyzer as sibling tabs. Opening one of those tools from the device detail page reuses the same window — a second Toolbox window is never opened for the same device.

Quick Commands

Inside the terminal, a small lightning-bolt button appears at the right edge of the current prompt line. Click it to open a menu of pre-loaded commands for common tasks. Select a command to paste it into the terminal — you can review and edit it before running. Hold Shift while selecting a command to execute it immediately instead of pasting.

Commands are grouped by shell type:

Shell

Example commands available

cmd

Disk usage, open ports, running services, system info, user logins

PowerShell

Event log errors, failed logins, local admins, scheduled tasks, Windows Update status

Linux

Cron jobs, disk usage, failed SSH logins, follow logs live, open ports, top processes

macOS

Disk usage, DNS flush, firewall status, macOS version, open ports, top processes

Tips

  • Terminal sessions are logged in the device activity log under the source Direct Session.

  • If the Terminal tab shows a connection error, confirm the device is still online and click Retry (in the connection-lost banner the action is labelled Reconnect).

  • The Toolbox window holds up to 10 tabs at once — close a tab you no longer need before opening another.

  • Each session is tied to your browser session. Closing the Toolbox window or signing out ends every open session cleanly.

  • Your browser may block popup windows on first use. If the Toolbox window does not appear after clicking Terminal, allow popups for the octoja site and try again.