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Guide to the Web UI

Summary

This section describes how to use the Web interface of rerobots. You can learn how to perform basic tasks like adding SSH keys to your account.

If you think that something is missing, or if you find errors, please contact us or open a ticket.

Table of contents

Uploading SSH public keys

Remote log-in to hosts of a workspace instance is achieved through ssh. If you save public keys to your user account, then they can easily be selected when you create a new instance. The process of doing so is described here. For this exercise, suppose that your key pair is the files demokey and demokey.pub. For example, these can be generated from the terminal:

ssh-keygen -f demokey

The public key is demokey.pub. It is the key that should be given to others who need to reliably authenticate you. The other file, demokey, is secret and must be kept in a safe place, such as in the directory ".ssh" in your home directory on your personal computer.

Now go to the SSH keys page, which should appear similar to the following screenshot:

screenshot of the SSH keys page

Copy-and-paste the contents of demokey.pub into the "key text" field of the "upload new public key" form. Then, give a name to this key pair that you can use later to refer to it on the rerobots website. Continuing our example, the completed form might look like:

screenshot of example filled upload key form

Finally, press the submit button. The newly uploaded public key should now appear in the table. For example,

screenshot of user's table of uploaded SSH keys, showing the new one

Making and revoking API tokens

As introduced in the Preliminaries section, API tokens are required to use the rerobots API directly, instead of through the Web console. API tokens are mainly of interest to application developers, and they are required to perform nontrivial actions from client libraries like the rerobots Python package.

To get and manage your API tokens, go to the API tokens page in the Web console. When there are no active tokens, the main section will appear similar to the following screenshot:

screenshot of the main section of the API tokens page

To create a new API token, use the control panel near the bottom of the page. Select the duration of validity of the API token. The default is 24 hours, i.e., the token cannot be used 24 hours or more after its creation. Click the button labeled make API token. The table should now have at least one row that appears like

screenshot of a single item in the API tokens table

Selecting one of the rows in the table will cause the corresponding API token to be displayed in a new panel titled "token" that appears similar to

screenshot of the detailed token view panel

In this panel, the token text is displayed and can be copy-and-pasted where you need it. To download the text as a file named jwt.txt, press the download button.

For security, the best practice is to revoke API tokens that are no longer required but have not yet expired. (Expired tokens cannot be used, and thus do not need to be manually revoked.) To do so, periodically go to your API tokens page in the Web console and review the table of active tokens. To revoke one, simply use its revoke button in the right column. To prevent mistakes, there is a confirmation dialog for the revoke action.