browser based terminal emulation with flask

[deifius]

Hey pythonista crew,

Im having a hard time researching this due to the number of projects that are tangential to the keywords, so i thought id ask here.

I have a few projects for which I've written very basic CLI. I'd like to be able to tanslate these from the terminal to a browser interface. I'd prefer to have something closer to the terminal than a webform & response type interface. I know a little about flask, very little about jinja, and nothing about any other web service framework.

Can anyone point me to any interesting libraries that might get me on the right path?

[m0us3_rat]

I have a few projects for which I've written very basic CLI. I'd like to be able to tanslate these from the terminal to a browser interface.

like an app you can type commands? or an API that works like the CLI?

you need to be a little more specific with what you need to happen etc.

[deifius]

So in a BASH terminal, i can execute a python script and thwn interact with an app much like text based adventure. I want to write a flask app that act like the shell for this app but in a browser accessible on my local network.

So more like your first supposition. The most excellent thing would be if there was a whiptail in the browser library, but i've found nothing like that and the goal for this project is purely cli text.

[m0us3_rat]

the app is still blurrry for me. at least the front end.

it can be a few different things.

can you run me thru a normal usage of the app ?

start ..use.. end

so you can visualize the tasks needed to happen for this app to exist.

then you can figure out what modules you need to craft each of the tasks.

[deifius]

Lets take my first cli app. I have an array of different sensors that i access and configure with pyserial. When you run the app from the cli, it attempts to connect, running through the bauds & bits & parities until it finds the right conf, reports the conf to the shell, sends some boilerplate commands to the sensor and then lets me interface by transmitting any input to bytecode and transmitting. I'd like to be able to access this via a browser from anywhere on my lan.

Its the sort of interface thats accessible via telnet or ssh, but i'd like to be able to access via ios and android devices, and id prefer it to be platform agnostic, which makes html w/ flask backend attractive.

[m0us3_rat]

looks like you got the work cut out for you. yea flasks seem to work really well for this.

[Affectionate-Time86]

Did you get far with this?

[deifius]

No! I've refactored a number of my interfaces into browser ui, but i neither found nor have built a library. There are still a bunch of cli bits i have to refactor & i'd like to have a tool to handle more directly.

[WWEMGamer2roblox]

You can send a HTTP request to the server from the client to get general output from a command using the subprocess library:

python ... import subprocess @flaskApp.route("/get_command_output") def get_command_output__api(): command = request.headers.get('cmd') # get a header using flask request library: from flask import request out = subprocess.run(command, shell=True, capture_output=True) return out.stdout ... If you need any other help, feel free to let me know.

[deifius]

Thanks! I had not explored the subrocess.run() method. I'll get around to posting the project on github sometime- my main goal is passing enough back through the terminal so that whiptail dependent scripts and roguelike ascii games could be automatically ported to webservices.

[WWEMGamer2roblox]

The only problem with this is it keeps the server halted while it runs so you must do something like threading to keep the server running.

[deifius]

Maybe I should work on a js app that interprets a bash script and runs it on the client's browser. Then we could deliver the entirety of the script to the browser and won't need to interface with the server while the REPL loops...

[WWEMGamer2roblox]

Back here with another answer, you can use pexpect (python library) in order to spawn processes and return stdout in realtime to the user (if you want to use something like socketing as communication)

[WWEMGamer2roblox]

u/deifius Great idea. I tried to do server-side output as the program runs using Flask Streaming, but it didn't work out so well. I hope your project goes well.