Commands hang when run as an SSH command

[dylanPowers]

When running an IPFS command over SSH as a command parameter, the process will hang. Simplest test:

ssh <host> 'ipfs cat <some_hash>'

I figured this is possibly because a terminal isn't present, so I went digging around the ssh man pages and what do you know running ssh <host> -t 'ipfs cat <some_hash>' works because it adds in a "pseudo-tty". That's a suitable workaround for ssh, but I'm sure this could trip up other applications that like to run commands without a terminal present.

[jbenet]

@dylanPowers agreed! this likley needs to be fixed in the cmds lib

[whyrusleeping]

this is still an issue

[ghost]

The fixes in #1263 are possibly related

[jbenet]

Would be nice to have a test case-- if we figure out what's hanging them we
can send those signals. Worst case if we cannot repro otherwise, maybe with
docker?
On Sat, Jan 2, 2016 at 13:28 Lars Gierth notifications@github.com wrote:

The fixes in #1263 #1263 are
possibly related

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Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub
#981 (comment).

[magik6k]

This is fixed now

[hbarcelos]

I have a functional IPFS node. If I run:

ssh <host> 'ipfs add test.txt'

I get:

Error: no IPFS repo found in /home/ubuntu/.ipfs.
please run: 'ipfs init'

If I SSH into the VM and run the command interactively, it works just fine.

[aschmahmann]

@hbarcelos your issue seems fairly different from this one. go-ipfs is not hanging but instead cannot find the repo. If the solution for you isn't apparent from my comments below could you open a new issue specifically for this that contains more info about your setup such as the output of ipfs version --all, where you installed the binary from, and if you've changed the IPFS_PATH environment variable?

go-ipfs uses the IPFS_PATH environment variable to locate where the repository is. My guess is that you installed go-ipfs using snap and the IPFS_PATH is set to be handled by snap https://github.com/ipfs/go-ipfs/blob/0d63fbb6059ac3a5fa9b658984cb1de12ec6c80f/snap/snapcraft.yaml#L24

Or alternatively you manually set IPFS_PATH to a different location.

If the correct IPFS_PATH environment variables (whether yours or snap's) are not available to the non-interactive shell the you'll run into problems. For more info on how environment variables differ in interactive vs non-interactive shells see here.

[hbarcelos]

@aschmahmann thanks a lot for the pointers.

In deed I had a custom IPFS_PATH and it was not being set on SSH non-interactive sessions because it was defined on my ~/.bash_profile.

I managed to workaround by setting it to the correct value on ~/.ssh/environment.