Tmux – Mark's Blog

I spend quite a bit of time on the shell, more often than not inside a tmux session. For those of you not familiar with tmux, it is a terminal multiplexer (akin to GNU screen) allowing you to split your terminal into multiple windows and panes. Its a tool that offers man conveniences such as being able to start a session on a server, detach from it and to come back to later (in a different SSH session) or even having multiple people sharing a single session without having to physically be in the same place.

When developing with Ruby I tend to program using Vim in a tmux session. In my setup I usually have a window per project which has three panes: one for Vim, a second to run processes in (such as a rails web server) and a third as a console to run ad-hoc commands or an application console. With my configuration this setup looks something like the below screenshot:

While you can easily create the above panes with a few keystrokes, you can also script tmux to setup this up for you with a single key combination. This is what I will be diving into in this article.

When you normally connect to a machine using SSH and start a tmux session SSH agent forwarding (if you have that setup) will work normally. When you however detach your session and re-attach it later you will find that it no longer does, this is because the environment variables in the shell inside the tmux session refers to the same SSH_AUTH_SOCK that it did when you originally connected.

Recent enough versions of tmux have something that can fix this for you, if you execute the command tmux show-environment -s you will see a bunch of shell commands to set a series of environment variables. If you execute those it will update the SSH information in the shell and agent forwarding will work once again, a shortcut to doing this in a single line would be eval "$(tmux show-environment -s)".

If you have your own dotfiles on the destination machine you can make this happen automatically. For bash users there’s the PROMP_COMMAND environment variable (see https://www.johntobin.ie/blog/updating_environment_variables_from_tmux/), for zsh users (like myself) you can do this by specifying a precmd hook.

If you add the following to your .zshrc (or a file you source inside it) you can set this up:

function update_environment_from_tmux() {
  if [ -n "${TMUX}" ]; then
    eval "$(tmux show-environment -s)"
  fi
}

add-zsh-hook precmd update_environment_from_tmux

The above will ensure that the update_environment_from_tmux function is executed before each command that you execute, if you re-attach to a tmux session that is using zsh with the above loaded and execute an SSH related command (git pull, scp, sftp, ssh, etc.) it will first automatically update the SSH environment variables and then execute the command making it work seamlessly.

The update_environment_from_tmux function only evals the tmux show-environment -s command if you are inside a tmux session (which will set the TMUX environment variable).

Category: Tmux

Scripting tmux

Tmux and SSH agent forwarding