Remote Development Manager

An experimental Go application that allows an SSH session to interact with the clipboard of the host machine and forward calls to open. RDM works by listening on a unix socket locally that can be forwarded to an SSH session.

The server works on MacOS and Linux, but the client commands are not OS specific.

Installation

The easiest way to install rdm is to download the latest release for your platform. Alternatively, you can build it yourself with go build main.go.

e.g. for a Linux server you can use wget to download the binary then put it somewhere in your $PATH:

wget https://github.com/BlakeWilliams/remote-development-manager/releases/latest/download/rdm-linux-amd64
mv rdm-linux-amd64 /usr/local/bin/rdm
chmod +x /usr/local/bin/rdm

Mac daemon installation

If you are running the server on MacOS you can set up rdm as a launchd service that will automatically start on system boot:

$ rdm service install
Run state:     [Running] done!
Run `launchctl print gui/501/me.blakewilliams.rdm` for more detail.
Configured to start at boot. Uninstall using:
        rdm service uninstall

Linux daemon installation with systemd

If you use systemd you can easily daemonize rdm for your user with:

systemctl edit --user --force --full rdm.service

That will open your $EDITOR and you should fill the file with something like:

[Unit]
Description=Remote Development Manager

[Service]
ExecStart=/path/to/rdm server
ExecStop=/path/to/rdm stop

Once that is done you can use systemctl --user start rdm or systemctl --user stop rdm when you want to start/stop the daemon or systemctl --user enable rdm so that it is automatically enabled for your user when it logs in.

Usage

The following is an example of forwarding an rdm server to a remote host: ssh -R 127.0.0.1:7391:$(rdm socket) user@mysite.net. It's worth noting the port number is not currently configurable and will always attempt to connect to 7391.

For Codespaces, rdm can be forwarded as part of the gh cs ssh command as arguments to ssh, e.g.: gh cs ssh -- -R 127.0.0.1:7391:$(rdm socket)

Server commands:

• rdm server - hosts a server locally (macOS only) so that your machine can receive copy, paste, and open commands.
• rdm stop - attempts to close a running server.
• rdm logpath - returns the path where server logs are located. Useful for tail $(rdm logpath)
• rdm socket - returns the path where the server socket lives. Useful for SSH commands, as seen above.

Client commands:

• rdm copy - reads stdin and forwards the input to the host machine, adding it to the clipboard. e.g. echo "hello world" | rdm copy
• rdm paste - reads and prints the host machine's clipboard. rdm paste
• rdm open - forwards the first argument to open. e.g. rdm open https://github.com/blakewilliams/remote-development-manager

Integrations

Here's a few tools you can easily hook rdm into:

Tmux

If you're using macOS and are already delegating copy to pbcopy you can easily use rdm in an ssh session by creating an alias.

alias pbcopy="rdm copy"

Alternatively, you can define the commands explicitly for rdm:

bind-key -T copy-mode-vi Enter send -X copy-pipe-and-cancel "rdm copy"
bind-key -T copy-mode-vi 'y' send -X copy-pipe-and-cancel "rdm copy"

Neovim

Neovim supports custom clipboards out-of-the-box. You can use rdm with Neovim using the following code:

let g:clipboard = {"name": "rdm", "copy": {}, "paste": {}}
let g:clipboard.copy["+"] = ["rdm", "copy"]
let g:clipboard.paste["+"] = ["rdm", "paste"]
let g:clipboard.copy["*"] = ["rdm", "copy"]
let g:clipboard.paste["*"] = ["rdm", "paste"]

Or if you use lua:

vim.g.clipboard = {
  name = "rdm",
  copy = {
    ["+"] = {"rdm", "copy"},
    ["*"] = {"rdm", "copy"}
  },
  paste = {
    ["+"] = {"rdm", "paste"},
    ["*"] = {"rdm", "paste"}
  },
}

For open support, add the following to ~/.zshenv if you're using zsh:

alias open="rdm open"
alias xdg-open="rdm open"

GitHub CLI

GitHub CLI allows you to configure the browser used to open URL's. We can use this to set rdm as the browser target:

$ gh config set browser "rdm open"

TO-DO

So far this is just an experiment and there's a lot to be done to get it to a stable point. Contributions are very welcome.

• Daemonize the server process
• Add a configuration file that allows custom commands
• Add instructions for vim