tmate is a terminal collaboration utility built atop tmux and SSH. Canonically, tmate sessions transit the tmate.io service, hosted on the public Internet.
Sometimes, that's just not desirable.
This repository packages the server components of tmate up into an easy-to-use BOSH release for deploying a tmate server on your terms.
We have a sample manifest, in manifests/tmate.yml that you can
tweak and deploy to get started:
bosh -e your-bosh-director deploy manifests/tmate.yml \
-v public_hostname_or_ip=your.tmate.server.example.com
Once that's deployed, you can pull down the ~/.tmate.conf
configuration for this tmate server:
curl http://your.tmate.server.example.com > ~/.tmate.conf
tmate
You should see something like this:
Configuration should be pretty straightforward. There are only three properties to set:
-
debug- If set to true, enables extra debugging from the tmate processs (which you can find in the logs, at/var/vcap/sys/log/tmate/tmate.log) -
port- The TCP port to listen to for inbound connection requests. Because the VM already has SSH running, this needs to be something other than "22". We settled on a default of "2222". -
host- The IP address or hostname to advertise to connecting clients.
That last one is the most important.
For ease-of-use, you're going to want to assign a static IP address to your tmate server job, and then configure DNS to point a memorable name at that address. For example:
$ dig IN A tmate.example.com
tmate.example.com. 9999 IN A 10.10.10.10
This DNS name is what you want to put in your deployment manifest
for the host property. Then, when clients connect, the
connection string for others to connect up to the tmate session
will be based on that hostname, and not the IP (or worse,
"localhost").