Skip to content

Ch5

Chapter 5 : Pair Programming with Tmux🔗

There are two ways to work with remote user

  • Create a new account that you share and others share
  • uses tmux sockets so you can have a second user connect to your tmux session without having to share your user account

Pairing with a Shared Account🔗

  • Create a new user : adduser tmux

  • Add ssh keys

    su tmux
mkdir ~/.ssh
touch ~/.ssh/authorized_keys
chmod 700 ~/.ssh
chmod 600 ~/.ssh/authorized_keys

  • Each user than would like to connect to tmux user will need public ssh keys

    ssh-keygen
cat ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub | ssh tmux@your_server 'cat >> .ssh/authorized_keys'
# you could also have used ssh-copy-id command but thats alright
# ssh-copy-id tmux@your_server
  • Then you will have to execute : tmux new-session -s Pairing
  • Then another team member can login and execute : tmux attach -t Pairing

Using a Shared Account and Grouped Sessions🔗

  • You can create normal session : tmux new-session -s groupedsession
  • Another person can attach to session in grouped way : tmux new-session -t groupedsession -s my sesion

This gives freedom to second user to easily make changes to windows and panes without affecting the first users presentation.

Quickly Pairing with tmate🔗

tmat is a fork of tmux designed to make pair programming painless.

Installation : 

sudo apt-get install software-properties-common
sudo add-apt-repostiory ppa:tmate.io/archive
sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install tmate

On Mac Installation

brew install tmate

To open tmate : tmate

To see console message : tmate show-messages

You can copy the ssh connection url at the bottom on status line and share it with your pair programmer.

tmate supports the same commands that tmux supports so we can create named sessions and even script it using tmuxinator yaml files.

Pairing with Separate Accounts and Sockets🔗

Lets create two users ted and barney

sudo adduser ted
sudo adduser barney
# create a tmux group and /var/tmux folder that will hold shared session
sudo addgroup tmux
sudo mkdir /var/tmux
# change ownership of above folder such tmux group user can access it
sudo chgrp tmux /var/tmux
# alter permission on folder so its accessible for all member of tmux group
sudo chmod g+ws /var/tmux
sudo usermod -aG tmux ted
sudo usermod -aG tmux barney

Creating and Sharing Sessions🔗

Ted creates a session different from default socket : tmux -S /var/tmux/pairing

In another window barney executes : tmux -S /var/tmux/pairing attach