Tmate is a remote terminal sharing tool that allows users to securely share their terminal with others in real-time, making it easy to collaborate, troubleshoot, and provide support across different systems and networks. It provides a seamless way to establish SSH connections and enables remote access without requiring complex network configurations.

Prerequisites

To deploy a tmate-ssh-server charm, you will need a Juju controller bootstrapped with any machine controller type. To see how to bootstrap your Juju installation with LXD, please refer to the documentation on LXD installation.

Setting up the tutorial model

To easily clean up the resources and to separate your workload from the contents of this tutorial, it is recommended to set up a new model with the following command.

$ juju add-model tmate-tutorial

Deploy the tmate-ssh-server charm

Use the following command to deploy the tmate-ssh-server charm.

$ juju deploy tmate-ssh-server

Get the tmate configuration contents

To get the contents of .tmate.conf file to register a tmate client, use the get-server-config action to retrieve the configuration details. Save the output contents into .tmate.conf file for later use.

$ juju run tmate-ssh-server/0 get-server-config | grep -E set | sed 's/^[[:space:]]*//' > .tmate.conf

The output of .tmate.conf file generated from the command above will look something like the following:

$ cat .tmate.conf
set -g tmate-server-host <tmate-ssh-server-unit-ip>
set -g tmate-server-port 10022
set -g tmate-server-rsa-fingerprint <rsa-fingerprint>
set -g tmate-server-ed25519-fingerprint <ed25519-fingerprint>

Create a tmate client machine

To imitate a tmate client, we can add a machine on Juju and install tmate.

$ juju add-machine
created machine 1

$ juju ssh 1 -- "sudo apt update && sudo apt install -y tmate"

Copy the .tmate.conf file retrieved from the Get the tmate configuration contents above to the client machine.

Then, register the public key of the current machine (use ssh-keygen to generate key files if none exist yet).

$ juju scp .tmate.conf 1:~/.tmate.conf
$ juju ssh 1 -- "echo $(~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub) >> ~/.ssh/authorized_keys"

Start the tmate client & get the ssh command.

# start a new tmate session
$ juju ssh 1 -- "tmate -a ~/.ssh/authorized_keys -S /tmp/tmate.sock new-session -d"
# wait until the tmate session is ready
$ juju ssh 1 -- "tmate -S /tmp/tmate.sock wait tmate-ready"
# print tmate ssh details
$ juju ssh 1 -- "tmate -S /tmp/tmate.sock display -p '#{tmate_ssh}'"
ssh -p10022 <user>@0.0.0.0

SSH into the tmate terminal

Use juju status command to find out the unit ip address.

$ juju status
Model           Controller  Cloud/Region         Version  SLA          Timestamp
tmate-tutorial  localhost   localhost/localhost  3.1.6    unsupported  <timestamp>

App               Version  Status  Scale  Charm             Channel  Rev  Exposed  Message
tmate-ssh-server           active      1  tmate-ssh-server             0  no       

Unit                 Workload  Agent  Machine  Public address  Ports  Message
tmate-ssh-server/0*  active    idle   0        <unit-ip>          

Machine  State    Address              Inst id        Base          AZ  Message
0        started  <unit-ip>            juju-92dc13-0  ubuntu@22.04      Running
1        started  <client-machine-ip>  juju-92dc13-1  ubuntu@22.04      Running

Then use the ssh command output from the previous step and replace 0.0.0.0 address to the unit IP of tmate-ssh-server unit.

$ ssh <user>@<unit-ip>

Tip: if you wish to use tmate only for remote access, run: tmate -F
To see the following messages again, run in a tmate session: tmate show-messages
Press <q> or <ctrl-c> to continue
---------------------------------------------------------------------
Connecting to <unit-ip>...
Note: clear your terminal before sharing readonly access
ssh session read only: ssh -p10022 ro-<ro-user>@<unit-ip>
ssh session: ssh -p10022 <user>@<unit-ip>

Cleaning up the environment

Congratulations! You have successfully finished the tmate-ssh-server tutorial. You can now remove the .tmate.conf file and the juju model environment that you’ve created using the following command.

$ rm .tmate.conf
$ juju destroy-model tmate-tutorial -y

Help improve this document in the forum (guidelines). Last updated 10 months ago.