Enable remote collaboration with tmate.io on Fedora

Being able to collaborate on task remotely is an increasing need in today’s world. Contributing to Open Source project ? Working remotely ? tmate is a tmux fork that makes it easy to share a terminal session with others. It can save you hours of lonely debugging or programming.

tmate, being a tmux fork, supports all of tmux features and configuration. Also tmux and tmate can co-exist on the same system. To learn more about tmux, you can read the following article

Use tmux for a more powerful terminal

Installing tmate on Fedora

tmate is available in the Fedora repository, making it really easy to install.

$ sudo dnf install tmate
$ tmate
Connecting to ssh.tmate.io…
 Note: clear your terminal before sharing readonly access
 web session read only: https://tmate.io/t/ro-F2aK7T
 ssh session read only: ssh ro-F2aK7TJsEj6b4T@l.tmate.io
 web session: https://tmate.io/t/H5rPw
 ssh session: ssh H5rPwR@l.tmate.io

After starting tmate, different ways to share your session will be available. You have the choice between ssh (read-only, read-write) or web (read-only, read-write).

The web client is known to have a few issues and is still work in progress, for example the tmux key bindings are not yet supported.

On the host running tmate, you start a new pane by hitting “Ctrl+b, c”. The new pane will then be available with anyone connected to your session.

You can easily keep track of how many clients are connected to your session, using the tmate control pane. To access it hit “Ctrl+b, 0 (zero)” you will then see something like this.

A mate has joined (109.95.145.251) -- 1 client currently connected
A mate has left (109.95.145.251) -- 0 client currently connected
A mate has joined (109.95.145.251) -- 1 client currently connected

To close a session you can simply close tmate “Ctrl+c, Ctrl+d“.

Running your own server

By default tmate is using a remote server hosted on tmate.io. If you prefer you have the possibility to run your own server. For convenience a container image is provided and instruction are available on tmate.io.

It is important to remember that sharing your terminal session in read-write mode will give full access to your system to the connected client. So make sure you trust the persons you sharing you session with or use the read-only mode.