Support for gotty (or similar) web terminal?

[harvie]

The SPICE terminal in proxmox web ui is nice, but i'd also like to have pure text based web terminal in Proxmox.

For example gotty looks quite promissing: https://github.com/yudai/gotty

Textmode web terminals in general have following (dis)advantages over spice:


1.) It only transfers textual data (no images) = more responsive when you get in poor connection speed.
2.) It presents real text to browser rather than image (terminal emulation is done in javascript), so it makes copypasting and key mapping way more user friendly since it directly uses native clipboard and keymap that browser uses.
3.) No problems with terminal resizing on fly. SPICE resizes by zooming image (changing character size), gotty just resizes like xterm would do if you resize window size.
4.) Does not work in graphic mode (You never really need that for LXC, also sometimes it might not be needed for KVM)
5.) It's rather similar to SSH for browser, while SPICE is more like VNC for browser. I think it would make sense to have both (while textmode being default for LXC).

GoTTY demo:

There are also alternatives for GoTTY like TTYd or WeTTY.
They basically all use Xterm.JS af frontend in browser https://github.com/xtermjs/xterm.js

 

[tom]

Try https://pve.proxmox.com/wiki/Serial_Terminal

 

[harvie]

@tom, yes. But that's solution for diffent problem.
I know how to get to text console over ssh. But i want REAL text console in browser.

Right now when you open text console in browser it's actually converted to image, so you don't get real text output to browser. You get screenshot image of text console. That is different.

 

[dcsapak]

this looks very interesting, i'll look at it how hard it is to integrate this

 

[dcsapak]

update:
i built a package which uses xtermjs (https://git.proxmox.com/?p=pve-xtermjs.git;a=summary)
and posted a few patches which makes use of this:
https://pve.proxmox.com/pipermail/pve-devel/2017-December/029653.html

to use this, you have to have a current version of pve-common (from git directly, all packaged versions are too old at the moment)
and you have to apply my patches an build the packages yourself

when my patches are applied/packages are built, i can update this thread again

 

[dcsapak]

pvetest/pve-no-subscription packages include now an xterm.js client for host shell and container terminal (in addition to novnc)

 

[harvie]

@dcsapak i've just installed it and it works perfectly! It allows me to seemlessly copypaste between browser console and rest of my desktop. also it resizes nicely with browser window. it just makes working with terminal very convenient. thank you very much for your effort.

 

[harvie]

And i just found it has very nice scrollback buffer that works just as i would expect, that's also super usefull. Even tho it's not very long in number of buffered lines, it still makes work much much easier.

Also what really amazed me is that i only needed to upgrade one server in the cluster and now i can use it to access other servers using xterm.js. I thought this will not be compatible with old servers.

BTW i think this might be much easier to integrate with mobile version of proxmox UI than novnc.

 

[dcsapak]

Also what really amazed me is that i only needed to upgrade one server in the cluster and now i can use it to access other servers using xterm.js. I thought this will not be compatible with old servers.

this is because the backend code actually runs on the server you connect to and tunnels the traffic to the other nodes via ssh

BTW i think this might be much easier to integrate with mobile version of proxmox UI than novnc.

yes a rework of the mobile gui is on my todo list... i hope i have time for this early next year

 

[harvie]

i think this may have fixed problems i had with writing some characters in novnc. especialy when not using english keyboard layout. very nice.

also it works even for node upgrade over UI and it's already available in stable repo (at least in pve-no-subscription).
i like how proxmox is modular, so stuff like this can be included as separate package.

 

[Mihai]

I'm very interested in this as well, as I frequently copy and paste from putty.

How exactly do I get this running and connect in this way?

 

[harvie]

How exactly do I get this running and connect in this way?

just upgrade (apt update; apt dist-upgrade) and refresh web (ctrl+R). it will show up next to old web console.

 

[Mihai]

just upgrade (apt update; apt dist-upgrade) and refresh web (ctrl+R). it will show up next to old web console.

Oh haha, great! Thanks.

 

[BlueLineSwinger]

This is great. Any way to make this the default over noVNC? It's not listed as an option for the Datacenter Console Viewer.

 

[tom]

This is great. Any way to make this the default over noVNC? It's not listed as an option for the Datacenter Console Viewer.

Not now, but in one of the next releases this could be the new default. And yes, we will add it as an option in the datacenter config.