Month: January 2018

Restoring tmux Sessions

I’ve been a big fan of tmux since I started using it in 2014. I use it locally for multiplexing my terminal, and in combination with mosh it’s also fantastic for work on remote servers. My main issue with it is losing my sessions when a box restarts. Luckily there’s plugins for tmux that solve this problem!

Prerequisites

  • tmux (brew install tmux on OS X)
  • TPM (tmux plugin manager). See https://github.com/tmux-plugins/tpm#installation for installation instructions.

Setup

There are two plugins I recommend: tmux-resurrect and tmux-continuum. tmux-resurrect enables saving and restoring tmux sessions manually, while tmux-continuum saves automatically and allows for automatically restoring from the last save when tmux is started. To enable these settings, add the following to your ~/.tmux.conf:

set -g @plugin 'tmux-plugins/tmux-resurrect'
set -g @plugin 'tmux-plugins/tmux-continuum'

set -g @continuum-restore 'on'

Usage

With this configuration, there’s no need to do anything manually. Your tmux sessions will be automatically saved every 15 minutes and automatically restored when tmux is started (e.g. after a reboot). You can manually save with prefix-Ctrl-s and manually restore with prefix-Ctrl-r if desired.

Note that this won’t restore running applications. tmux-resurrect has an optional configuration for doing so, but I’ve left this off for the time being.

HTTPS Support

I didn’t keep up with my promise to blog more regularly from summer 2016, but it’s a new year and I’m giving it another go.

To start things off, I decided to finally enable HTTPS for this site and my separate site for short fiction. Even though these sites are low-traffic and don’t deal with any sensitive information, it’s still a good idea to support HTTPS. See https://www.eff.org/encrypt-the-web for some background on why.

I had looked at doing this when I first started running this site,  but at the time it was a pretty tedious process. Today it’s straightforward, even though I’m on shared hosting.

First I needed to get certificates. I chose to use Let’s Encrypt, since it’s free, highly automated, and a joint, open effort. To actually interact with Let’s Encrypt, I installed the Acme PHP client on my web hosts. This tool allowed me to obtain the certificates via one shell command:

php bin/acme issue --domains andrewjamesjohnson.com:www.andrewjamesjohnson.com --path /home/andrewja/public_html:/home/andrewja/public_html --server letsencrypt

Then I modified the .htaccess file to redirect all HTTP traffic to HTTPS:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTPS} !=on
RewriteRule ^.*$ https://%{SERVER_NAME}%{REQUEST_URI} [R,L]

And that’s it!

The only piece I don’t have totally working is automatic renewal of my certificates. I’ve got the renewal happening on a cron but it’s not yet updating the one used by the site.