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Help:Access to Toolforge instances with PuTTY and WinSCP

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Please help improve the content of this page: https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T334697

This page documents Single-click solutions for accessing your Toolforge instances using PuTTY and WinSCP.

  • PuTTY is a terminal emulator that has SSH support.
  • WinSCP is a Windows GUI for secure file transfer that has SFTP support.

The instructions below can also be used to login with the ssh command in Linux (i.e. ssh username@login.toolforge.org).

For other Cloud VPS projects than tools on Toolforge, instructions differ.

With the correct settings, a single click shell connection or file transfer is possible, and no command line input trouble is needed.

Prerequisites

Information:

  • USERNAME: your Wikimedia developer account shell username (you may find it at idm.wikimedia.org)
  • PATH-TO-YOUR-PRIVATE-KEY: the path and name of your private key file on your local system. You can add your public SSH key in the Toolforge admin console.

Programs:

  • PuTTY
  • WinSCP
  • plink.exe (part of PuTTY suite)
  • Pageant (PuTTY authentication agent, part of both the PuTTY and WinSCP suites)

How to set up PuTTY for direct access to your Toolforge account

You are likely going to set up connections to each of the login servers:

Make sure private key is compatible with putty. Sometimes you need to convert it using puttygen or generate keys in PuTTY.

The remaining configuration options are identical for all login servers. Of course, you may prefer screen and scroll buffer sizes of your choice:

Adding a keep-alive time will prevent your connection from dropping when inactive.

In order to start the webservice, input the following commands: 

$ become PROJECT-NAME
$ mkdir public_html
$ webservice start

Use webservice --help to get a full list of arguments.

How to set up WinSCP for direct access to your Toolforge account

With WinSCP you must setup a site pointing to the adequate hostname and change the advanced settings to use your private key file on the authentication tab.

Your project is located in the folder:
/data/project/PROJECT-NAME
Switch to the tool account by giving the protocol option:
sudo -u tools.PROJECT-NAME /usr/lib/sftp-server
Enter the path to your private key

Troubleshooting permissions errors

File permission problems can prevent tool maintainers from uploading, modifying, or managing files in a tool account. Common issues include missing group write permissions and incorrect file ownership.

If you experience permission-related errors, check that:

  • the tool account owns the affected files and directories;
  • the tool account belongs to the appropriate group;
  • the required group write permissions are present.

Guidance for inspecting directory permissions, understanding the Toolforge permission model, and restoring group write access is available at Managing and sharing files in Toolforge – Common problems.

FileZilla

You may also like to use FileZilla for managing files in the remote directory. FileZilla supports SFTP and Putty SSH keys and can be configured with the same configuration settings as above for WinScp. See How to put your SSH key to FileZilla. However, FileZilla lacks the feature of on-login "sudo" SSH command unfortunately. So, you'll stay without "become PROJECT-NAME" forever and your experience won't be very comfortable. There's an issue at FileZilla support site.

You can however route the location to that of your project, and that can be done by replacing it with (usually)/data/project/project_name.

Because of the become issue above, FileZilla will create files with the wrong owner, which can create headaches later on. You will also be unable to create folders.

Communication and support

Support and administration of the WMCS resources is provided by the Wikimedia Foundation Cloud Services team and Wikimedia movement volunteers. Please reach out with questions and join the conversation:

Discuss and receive general support
  • Chat in real time in the IRC channel #wikimedia-cloud connect or the bridged Telegram group
  • Discuss via email after you have subscribed to the cloud@ mailing list
Stay aware of critical changes and plans
Track work tasks and report bugs

Use a subproject of the #Cloud-Services Phabricator project to track confirmed bug reports and feature requests about the Cloud Services infrastructure itself

Read stories and WMCS blog posts

Read posts about Cloud Services on the Wikimedia Technical Blog. (Older posts can be read from the Cloud Services Blog.)

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