Burrow Now Supports Direct Connections

May 13, 2026

A small addition to burrow since the last post.

Burrow is primarily a tool for querying databases behind a bastion — that has not changed. But occasionally you want to run the same queries against a local development database that does not need a tunnel. Rather than context-switch to psql, you can now add a profile with use_ssh = false:

[local]
use_ssh     = false
db_host     = "localhost"
db_user     = "myuser"
db_password = "secret"
db_name     = "mydb"

When use_ssh is false, burrow skips the SSH transport and connects to PostgreSQL directly. Everything else — burrow query, burrow describe, burrow shell, output formats, profile switching — works exactly the same.

use_ssh defaults to true, so existing configs continue to work without any changes. The config set wizard also picks this up: it asks about SSH mode first and only prompts for bastion details when needed.


The source is at github.com/nobleknightt/burrow.