Persistent sessions

This page covers Herdr sessions (herdr attach and herdr sessions). For persistent remote tmux shells in either local multiplexer, see terminal & box picker. tailmux herdr sessions does not enumerate those tmux shells.

Install Herdr on the host

Tailmux handles transport; Herdr owns the remote terminal processes. Install Herdr for your remote user using its official installer:

curl -fsSL https://herdr.dev/install.sh -o /tmp/install-herdr.sh
sh /tmp/install-herdr.sh

Herdr installs to ~/.local/bin by default. Make that directory available to your SSH shell. For Bash, a PATH export in .bashrc needs to appear before an early return for non-interactive shells. For Zsh, .zshenv is read for non-interactive shells too.

Verify from your laptop:

tailmux ssh personal/devbox herdr --version

Attach and detach

tailmux herdr attach personal/devbox

The default named session is agents. Choose a different one with a second argument:

tailmux herdr attach personal/devbox review

Press Ctrl+B, then Q to detach. Closing this connection does not stop the Herdr server. Repeating the attach command reconnects to the same session.

View multiple hosts together

Use tailmux herdr open for one local Herdr interface containing a workspace per saved host. See one view, multiple boxes for setup and navigation.

Check what is running

tailmux herdr sessions personal/devbox
tailmux herdr sessions --all

--all shows a table for saved hosts and reports errors per host. Add --json for the machine-readable response grouped by host. It uses non-interactive SSH authentication, so authorize your agent and establish access with ssh or attach first if needed.

Try persistence yourself

In a Herdr shell, run:

export SESSION_MARKER=hello-again
printf 'Shell PID: %s\n' "$$"
sleep 15
printf 'Finished: %s\n' "$SESSION_MARKER"

Detach during the sleep, reconnect, and check the output. The same shell and variable should remain.

What survives?

The current Tailmux attach mode runs Herdr inside SSH. It does not provide the local clipboard bridge offered by Herdr's own thin-client remote mode.