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Cannot connect to tmate worker with no apparent error

Open fandreuz opened this issue 7 months ago • 3 comments

Hi, thank you for working on this project. I wanted to give it a shot, but I cannot connect to the tmate worker. I tried both SSH and the web shell, disabling auth with limit-access-to-actor: false, but in all cases I get some waiting time and then a timeout.

fandreuz avatar Apr 30 '25 10:04 fandreuz

I tried the basic example in the README:

name: CI
on: [push]
jobs:
  build:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
    - uses: actions/checkout@v4
    - name: Setup tmate session
      uses: mxschmitt/action-tmate@v3
      with:
        limit-access-to-actor: false

and this does not work either.

fandreuz avatar Apr 30 '25 10:04 fandreuz

It seems we need to search for a replacement. :-( tmate which this action is based on is dead, unless the author of this action (or anyone else) will effectively step-up and provide replacement servers. :-( https://github.com/tmate-io/tmate/issues/322#issuecomment-3083622301 For me not even SSH access works.

Vampire avatar Aug 14 '25 13:08 Vampire

Ignore what I said, SSH access works again for me, it probably just was a hiccup.

While I was hit by the SSH hiccup I also evaluated alternatives with the main requirement that they are working on all three major OS and are currently working. So just in case we finally do need to use an alternative, the best options I currently found were:

  • indeed the action-upterm if Windows is not needed or maybe gets added
  • debug-via-ssh but this has some restrictions, because you need an ngrok account for it and now they also require you to give a credit card to identify as non-abuser without it being charged, but some people might not have a credit card or don't want to provide it. And afair you are also restricted to one SSH session at a time in the free ngrok account which can also become cumbersome if you debug a matrix build, especially as there by default the session stays alive when you continue and there was no easy way to kill the ngrok session an on macOS could not even continue the job. There are alternatives using ngrok but this was the best I found from testing that also worked halfway.
  • most probably the best replacement unless maybe action-upterm gets Windows support was actiondebugger-by-warpbuild, as warpbuild is a tmate fork iirc and their action is a fork of this action. Maybe it could even work to specify the warpbuild servers for this action if it stayed compatible, I did not try that.

Vampire avatar Sep 19 '25 13:09 Vampire