relay 0.0.6

Meta-magical SSH tunnels for remote developers behind firewalls.

Meta-magical SSH tunnels for remote developers behind firewalls.

Currently allows for sharing SSH connections (for collaborating in tmux+vim) and for sharing local development webservers.

Install

Relay can be installed in a virtualenv, but we recommend installing it with sudo so it is always available:

sudo pip install relay

General setup

(nprapps users see the next section)

Relay uses a configuration file located at ~/.relay.conf. Create this file with contents such as:

[relay]

# User to connect to the relay server as
user = ubuntu
server = relay_server.your_domain.com
private_key = /path/to/your/private_key
public_key = /path/to/your/public_key.pub
pair_user = relay
ports_json = /path/to/your/ports.json
bash_profile = /path/to/your/bash_profile

ports.json is a mapping of user’s local ports to remote ports on the server, so that users will never collide when creating SSH tunnels. Create this file with contents such as:

{
    "chris": {
        "22": "2222",
        "8000": "8000"
    },
    "katie": {
        "22": "2223",
        "8000": "8001"
    },
}

You then need to create a relay user. This process is automated:

relay setup

NPRApps setup

Pre-baked configuration files are in our Dropbox folder. You must have Dropbox installed, syncing to ~/Dropbox and the nprapps shared folder synced to your local computer. Then run:

ln -s ~/Dropbox/nprapps/relay/relay.conf ~/.relay.conf
relay setup

Sharing SSH

To share your SSH connection (for tmux’ing), open a new terminal (or tab or tmux pane):

relay user:$USER share:22

Where $USER is your username in ports.json.

To connect to a shared SSH connection:

relay user:$USER ssh

Where $USER is the username in ports.json of the user sharing the connection.

Sharing development webserver

To share your local development webserver, open a new terminal (or tab or tmux pane):

relay user:$USER share:8000

Where $USER is your username in ports.json.

To connect open a shared webserver in your browser:

relay user:$USER web

Where $USER is the username in ports.json of the user sharing the webserver.