Automatic waypipe setup for SSH remote forwarding of clipboard (via wl-copy/paste) and other Wayland clients

README.md

README

The goal of this gist is to setup waypipe to automically run locally on user login and remotely when you connect to it. In both cases, this is managed by systemd user session and assumes that is running. This took way too long to figure out, so I hope it helps someone (or me) in the future.

Instructions

Local

On your local system, copy the waypipe-client.service to the user systemd directory.

install -d 0755 ${HOME}/.config/systemd/user/
install waypipe-client.service ${HOME}/.config/systemd/user/
systemctl --user daemon-reload
systemctl --user enable --now waypipe-client.service

Configure SSH Remote Forward by creating or amending an entry for your remote host. It should look like the ssh_config file in this gist.

Remote

On the remote system, do similarly with waypipe-server.service.

install -d 0755 ${HOME}/.config/systemd/user/
install waypipe-server.service ${HOME}/.config/systemd/user/
systemctl --user daemon-reload
systemctl --user enable --now waypipe-server.service

ssh_config

# Append to ${HOME}/.ssh/config

Host my-remote
    # other relevant configuration
    RemoteForward ${XDG_RUNTIME_DIR}/waypipe-server.sock:${XDG_RUNTIME_DIR}/waypipe-client.sock

waypipe-client.service

# ${HOME}/.config/systemd/user/waypipe-client.service
[Unit]
Description=Runs waypipe on startup to support SSH forwarding

[Service]
ExecStart=/usr/bin/waypipe --socket %t/%N.sock client

[Install]
WantedBy=default.target

waypipe-server.service

# ${HOME}/.config/systemd/user/waypipe-server.service
[Unit]
Description=Runs waypipe on startup to support SSH forwarding

[Service]
Type=simple
ExecStart=/usr/bin/waypipe --socket %t/%N.sock --no-gpu --display %t/wayland-remote server -- sleep inf

[Install]
WantedBy=default.target

I tried to make this work with systemd socket activation, but it seems that just isn't possible yet. I filed a feature request.

I read the configs above as only working with one "waypipe-client". So connecting from two different clients at the same time would pose a problem. Please correct me if I'm wrong. Thanks for the examples given.