WeTTy = Web + TTy

Terminal over HTTP and https. WeTTy is an alternative to ajaxterm and anyterm but much better than them because WeTTy uses xterm.js which is a full fledged implementation of terminal emulation written entirely in JavaScript. WeTTy uses websockets rather then Ajax and hence better response time.

Install

WeTTy can be installed from source or from npm.

To install from source run:

$ git clone https://github.com/krishnasrinivas/wetty.git
$ cd wetty
$ yarn
$ yarn build

To install it globally from npm use yarn or npm:

• yarn, yarn -g add wetty.js
• npm, npm i -g wetty.js

For auto-login feature you'll need sshpass installed(NOT required for rest of the program".

• apt-get install sshpass (debian eg. Ubuntu)
• yum install sshpass (red hat flavours eg. CentOs)

Running WeTTy

Wettu can either be run as a standalone service or from another node script. To see how to use WeTTy from node see the API Doc

$ node index.js

Open your browser on http://yourserver:3000/wetty and you will prompted to login. Or go to http://yourserver:3000/wetty/ssh/<username> to specify the user before hand.

If you run it as root it will launch /bin/login (where you can specify the user name), else it will launch ssh and connect by default to localhost.

If instead you wish to connect to a remote host you can specify the --sshhost option, the SSH port using the --sshport option and the SSH user using the --sshuser option.

Flags

WeTTy can be run with the --help flag to get a full list of flags.

Server Port

WeTTy runs on port 3000 by default. You can change the default port by starting with the --port or -p flag.

SSH Host

If WeTTy is run as root while the host is set as the local machine it will use the login binary rather than ssh. If no host is specified it will use localhost as the ssh host.

If instead you wish to connect to a remote host you can specify the host with the --sshhost flag and pass the IP or DNS address of the host you want to connect to.

Default User

You can specify the default user used to ssh to a host using the --sshuser. This user can overwritten by going to http://yourserver:3000/ssh/<username>. If this is left blank a user will be prompted to enter their username when they connect.

SSH Port

By default WeTTy will try to ssh to port 22, if your host uses an alternative ssh port this can be specified with the flag --sshport.

WeTTy URL

If you'd prefer an HTTP base prefix other than /wetty, you can specify that with --base.

Do not set this to /ssh/${something}, as this will break username matching code.

HTTPS

Always use HTTPS especially with a terminal to your server. You can add HTTPS by either using WeTTy behind a proxy or directly.

To run WeTTy directly with ssl use both the --sslkey and --sslcert flags and pass them the path too your cert and key as follows:

node index.js --sslkey key.pem --sslcert cert.pem

If you don't have SSL certificates from a CA you can create a self signed certificate using this command:

openssl req -x509 -newkey rsa:2048 -keyout key.pem -out cert.pem -days 30000 -nodes

Auto Login:

You can also pass the ssh password as an optional query parameter to auto-login the user like this (Only while running wetty as a non root account):

http://yourserver:3000/wetty/ssh/<username>?sshpass=<password>

This is not a required feature and the security implications for passing the password in the url will have to be considered by the user

Run wetty behind nginx or apache

As said earlier you can use a proxy to add https to WeTTy.

Note that if your proxy is configured for https you should run WeTTy without SSL

If your proxy uses a base path other than /wetty, specify the path with the --base flag, or the BASE environment variable.

Nginx

For a more detailed look see the nginx.conf used for testing

Put the following configuration in nginx's conf:

location /wetty {
  proxy_pass http://127.0.0.1:3000/wetty;
  proxy_http_version 1.1;
  proxy_set_header Upgrade $http_upgrade;
  proxy_set_header Connection "upgrade";
  proxy_read_timeout 43200000;

  proxy_set_header X-Real-IP $remote_addr;
  proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-For $proxy_add_x_forwarded_for;
  proxy_set_header Host $http_host;
  proxy_set_header X-NginX-Proxy true;
}

Apache

Put the following configuration in apache's conf:

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI}  ^/wetty/socket.io [NC]
RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} transport=websocket [NC]
RewriteRule /wetty/socket.io/(.*) ws://localhost:3000/wetty/socket.io/$1 [P,L]

<LocationMatch ^/wetty/(.*)>
  DirectorySlash On
  Require all granted
  ProxyPassMatch http://127.0.0.1:3000
  ProxyPassReverse /wetty/
</LocationMatch>

Dockerized Version

WeTTy can be run from a container to ssh to a remote host or the host system. This is handy for quick deployments. Just modify docker-compose.yml for your host and run:

$ docker-compose up -d

Visit the appropriate URL in your browser ([localhost|$(boot2docker ip)]:PORT).

The default username is term and the password is term, if you did not modify SSHHOST

In the docker version all flags can be accessed as environment variables such as SSHHOST or SSHPORT.

If you dont want to build the image yourself just remove the line build; .

Run WeTTy as a service daemon

init.d

$ sudo yarn global add wetty.js
$ sudo cp ~/.config/yarn/global/node_modules/wetty.js/bin/wetty.conf /etc/init
$ sudo start wetty

systemd

$ yarn global add wetty.js
$ cp ~/.config/yarn/global/node_modules/wetty.js/bin/wetty.service  ~/.config/systemd/user/
$ systemctl --user enable wetty
$ systemctl --user start wetty

This will start WeTTy on port 3000. If you want to change the port or redirect stdout/stderr you should change the last line in wetty.conf file, something like this:

exec sudo -u root wetty -p 80 >> /var/log/wetty.log 2>&1

FAQ

What browsers are supported?

WeTTy supports all browsers that xterm.js supports.