TTY Share

A small tool that allows sharing the terminal over the Internet, in the web browser. It works with a shell command, or any other utility that relies on the unix PTY architecture.

It consists of two command line utilities: tty_sender and tty_server. The server is only needed if you want to host it yourself.

The tty_sender is used on the machine that wants to share the terminal, and it connects to the server to generate a unique URL, over which the terminal can be viewed in the browser.

Read more about how it works in the documentation.

Downloading and running the code

Download the latest tty_sender binary release, and run it using a demo server instance at tty-share.elisescu.com:

tty_sender --server tty-share.elisescu.com:7654

If you wanna keep using it, you can also create an alias and add it to your bash startup file (.profile or .bashrc): alias tty-share='tty_sender --server tty-share.elisescu.com:7654'

Building and running the code

For an easy deployment, the server can bundle inside the binary all the frontend resources, so in the end, there will be only one file to be copied and deployed. However, the frontend resources, can also be served from a local folder, with a command line flag.

Build all

cd frontend
npm install
npm run build # builds the frontend
cd -
make all # builds both the sender and server

Run a development server

make runs

Will run the server on the localhost.

Run a development sender

make runc

Will run the sender and connect it to the server running on the local host (so the above command has to be ran first).

For more info, on how to run, see the Makefile, or the help of the two binaries (tty_sender and tty_receiver)

The project didn't follow the typical way of building go applications, because everything is put in one single project and package, for the ease of development, and also because the bundle containing the frontend has to be built as well. Perhaps there's a better way, but this works for now.

TLS and HTTPS

At the moment the tty_sender supports connecting over a TLS connection to the server, but the server doesn't have that implemented yet. However, the server can easily run behind a proxy which can take care of encrypting the connections from the senders and receivers (doing both TLS and HTTPS), without the server knowing about it. However, the server should have support for being able to listen on TLS connections from the sender as well, and this will be added in the future.

TODO

There are several improvements, and additions that can be done further:

• Update the tests and write some more.
• Add support for listening on sender connections over TLS.
• React on the tty_receiver window size as well. For now, the size of the terminal window is decided by the tty_sender, but perhaps both the sender and receiver should have a say in this.
• Read only sessions, where the tty_reciver side can only watch, and cannot interact with the terminal session on the sender side.
• Non-web based tty_receiver can be implemented as well, without the need of a browser, but using it from the command line.
• End-to-end encryption. Right now, the server can see what messages the sender and receiver are exchanging, but an end-to-end encryption layer can be built on top of this. It has been thought from the beginning, but it's just not implemented. The terminal IO messages are packed in protocol messages, and the payload can be easily encrypted with a shared key derived from a password that only the sender and receiver sides know.
• Notify the tty_sender user when a tty_receiver got connected.
• Many other

Other solutions

• tmate - is a very similar solution, which I have been using several times. It works really well - the only disadvantage, being that it doesn't support sharing it via the browser.

Credits

• xterm.js - used in the browser receiver.
• gotty - used for inspiration and motivation.
• tmate - inspiration and motivation.
• https://codepen.io/chiaren/pen/ALwnI - for the free 404 page.