Commander is a simple systemd enabled daemon written in Go, which listens on a Unix Domain Socket for JSON payloads expressing a Command. Commands are simply structs in Go which adhere to a specific interface and perform some lower-level action.
Use cases for Commands include:
- Interfacing with
dbusfor the control of a network interface; - Generating configuration files via template processing;
- Interacting with
systemdunits; - Updating
iptablesrules.
This is a barebones proof of concept at the moment, but I'm hoping it'll lead to me realising a project that I've had on the backburner for around 18 months - of having a Raspberry Pi configured as a small little secured router.
Rather than manually using SSH to adjust configuration files though, I'd like to have one that's usable and easy enough for a novice to use - so naturally a web interface is required. Unfortunately I've seen a few solutions which rely upon hacky PHP applications that are littered with exec() commands and other nasties; so I thought I'd take a different approach and try and architect it properly.
With this in mind, I can write a small PHP layer which glues the UI with Commander - the underlying system management layer. The web interface needs to know little - or nothing - about the intricacies of configuring dnsmasq, hostapd, openvpn, iptables, or any of the other underlying components. All the UI layer needs to do is to be able to tell Commander what the desired end-result is.
This actually had a working proof of concept, but it had some very ugly logic and was overly complex.
Copyright 2017 fergus@fergus.london https://fergus.london
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