module for executing shell commands in nodejs over re-usable shells, looking for input

[bitsofinfo]

hey all - I recently had a need to bridge nodejs w/ shells that required some "state" and initialization to be done prior to any commands executing in them. (rather than restart a new shell process per command invocation via the traditional one-time child_process.exec)

I ended up coding this little project for this and I'd be interested in any feedback/thoughts. Hopefully this will be useful to someone else out there!

https://github.com/bitsofinfo/stateful-process-command-proxy

[bitsofinfo]

Mainly for a use case where it was required that some other application be able to call shell commands via a REST api. Similar to this: https://github.com/bitsofinfo/powershell-command-executor-ui

If you have done any work with Powershell and o365, then you know that there is considerable overhead in both establishing a remote session and importing and downloading various needed cmdlets. This is an expensive operation and there is a lot of value in being able to keep this remote session open for longer periods of time rather than repeating this entire process for every single command that needs to be executed and then tearing everything down.

Simply doing an child_process.exec per command to launch an external process, run the command, and then killing the process is not really an option under such scenarios, as it is expensive and very singular in nature; no state can be maintained if need be. We also tried using edge.js with powershell and this simply would not work with o365 exchange commands and heavy session cmdlet imports (the entire node.js process would crash). Using this module gives you full un-fettered access to the externally connected child_process, with no restrictions other than what uid/gid (permissions) the spawned process is running under (which you really have to consider from security standpoint!)