Writing Go with friends
Pair programming with TMUX
10 Jul 2016

Leigh McCulloch
Software Engineer
@___leigh___

* Setup

: I'm going to show you how you can quickly create a remote pairing environment so that we can pair without sharing a keyboard. You can use this is you're standing next somebody, or if they're remote, or if you've only met them on github.

: The first thing I do is create a throw away instance on digital ocean with Ubuntu.

Create a throw away instance. e.g. Digital Ocean

: And ssh in as root and install the minimum apps I need.

Basic setup

  add-apt-repository -y ppa:ubuntu-lxc/lxd-stable
  apt-get update -y
  apt-get install -y git tmux vim golang

: I'll then create a user for each person pairing, pull their public github ssh keys, so that each party can ssh in without needing to setup a password. This is really great if I've only met someone on github. I can ask them to ssh in without then needing to do anything for setup, and I can post the SSH details straight into a public PR.

Create a user for everyone pairing

  adduser --disabled-password --gecos "" $username
  mkdir ~$username/.ssh
  curl https://github.com/$username.keys > ~$username/.ssh/authorized_keys

: And we're done. We have a basic pairing environment setup.

* Pairing

: The person starting the session can run tmux new, and use factl to grant permission for the other user to access the tmux socket. The other person can then join. 

Start a session

  ssh leighmcculloch@107.170.236.186
  tmux -S /tmp/pair new
  setfacl -m user:tenxdev:rwx /tmp/pair

Join a session

  ssh tenxdev@107.170.236.186
  tmux -S /tmp/pair attach

: It's this simple.