Manually Configuring SSH Tunneling
If you are manually configuring remote debugging without Wing Pro's Remote Hosts feature, you may find that firewalls get in the way of making a direct connection between the remote host and Wing running locally. The best way around this is to establish an SSH tunnel that forwards network traffic from the remote host to the local host. This also encrypts all your debugger traffic in a secure way.
Doing this does require a working SSH server, but most remote hosts will already have that running. You will also need to set up remote login using SSH first, and in most case add your SSH key to the list of allowed keys on the remote host, so that SSH can login without any password.
Setting up SSH to a remote host is described in detail in SSH Setup Details.
Once that is done, SSH tunneling can be configured as described below.
Tunneling with OpenSSH
When Wing is running on macOS or Linux, or if you have OpenSSH on Windows provided by cygwin or Git Bash, tunneling can be done as follows from the machine that is running Wing (not the remote host):
ssh -N -R 50005:localhost:50005 username@remotehost
You'll need to replace username@remotehost with the login name and ip address of the remote host.
The -N option causes ssh to set up the tunnel but not run any command on the remote host.
The -R option sets up a reverse tunnel, which is needed since the debug process initiates the connection back to the IDE. The argument following it indicates that port 50005 should be tunneled from the remote host to locahost.
Optionally, an -f option could be added just after ssh to cause ssh to run in the background. Without this option, you can use Ctrl-C to terminate the tunnel. With it, you'll need to use ps and kill to manage the process.
If you also want a login shell on the remote host, use this form instead:
ssh -R 50005:localhost:50005 username@remotehost bash
SSH Tunneling with PuTTY
When Wing is running on Windows and you don't have OpenSSH available, PuTTY can be used instead to configure an SSH tunnel. This is done on the Connections > SSH > Tunnels page in PuTTY configuration: Set Source port to 50005, Destination to localhost:50005, and select the Remote radio button, then press the Add button. Once this is done the tunnel will be established whenever PuTTY is connected to the remote host.
Using Different Port Numbers
The above assumes the default configuration, where Wing is listening for connections on port 50005. If for some reason you can't use port 50005 as the debug port on either machine, this can be changed on the remote host with kHostPort in wingdbstub.py or with the WINGDB_HOSTPORT environment variable. To change the port the IDE is listening on, use the Debugger > Listening > Server Port preference and or Debug Server Port in Project Properties in Wing.
If this is done, you will need to replace the port numbers in the SSH tunnel invocation in the following form:
ssh -N -R <remote_port>:localhost:<ide_port> username@remotehost
<remote_port is the port specified in kHostPort or with WINGDB_HOSTPORT environment variable on the remote host, and <ide_port> is the port set in Wing's preferences or Project Properties.
On Windows using PuTTY, the Source port is the port set with kHostPort or WINGDB_HOSTPORT on the remote host, and the port in the Destination is the port Wing is configured to listen on.
