tmux share session for presentation

09 Dec 2014

i live in my terminals and this is a reminder to myself and others how you can create a sort of audience viewable tmux session that lets one person (me) control the session so that others may view it.

first step is to create a session

tmux new-session -s presentation

set fixed width and height for the window so clients cannot resize it. usually, it will adapt to fit the minimum heights and widths amongst all clients—this stops that.

tmux set-window-option -t presentation force-width 80
tmux set-window-option -t presentation force-height 24

now we need to get clients to connect. what i like to do is use ssh keys and use the authorized_keys file to force users of that key into a read-only tmux session.

create a new keypair

ssh-keygen -f ~/presentation_key

add an entry in .ssh/authorized_keys with the public portion of the created key pair.

command="tmux attach-session -t presentation -r" ssh-rsa AAA....

note the command="..." section before the actual public key part that is normally listed. this is a command that runs when the user logs in and forces them into whatever command you want (it’s very cool).

now give out the presentation_key file to other people to use to connect to your machine. they should be locked in a sort of audience styled read-only session of your tmux session.

ssh -i ~/presentation_key my-host

when you are finished, remove the ssh key and its entry from your authorized_keys file, and then terminate the tmux session.