MODIFICATION:
This is a fork of websocketd. Changes are as follows:
From the launched program's point of view, stdin/stdout work as before. Now it is also possible to read binary messages on fd=3, and write binary messages on fd=4. To indicate where the binary messages end, the format is:
5 byte header: 4 byte data length (little endian), 1 byte "type"
variable length data: raw bytes (number specified by length)
From the browser's point of view, all messages now have the format:
1 byte type, variable length data
Messages from stdout will be of type 0. Messages sent with type 0 will go to stdin. All other types will be treated as binary messages.
websocketd is a small command-line tool that will wrap an existing command-line interface program, and allow it to be accessed via a WebSocket.
WebSocket-capable applications can now be built very easily. As long as you can write an executable program that reads STDIN and writes to STDOUT, you can build a WebSocket server. Do it in Python, Ruby, Perl, Bash, .NET, C, Go, PHP, Java, Clojure, Scala, Groovy, Expect, Awk, VBScript, Haskell, Lua, R, whatever! No networking libraries necessary.
Upon startup, websocketd will start a WebSocket server on a specified port, and listen for connections.
Upon a connection, it will fork the appropriate process, and disconnect the process when the WebSocket connection closes (and vice-versa).
Any message sent from the WebSocket client will be piped to the process's STDIN stream, followed by a \n newline.
Any text printed by the process to STDOUT shall be sent as a WebSocket message whenever a \n newline is encountered.
Download for Linux, OS X and Windows
To get started, we'll create a WebSocket endpoint that will accept connections, then send back messages, counting to 10 with 1 second pause between each one, before disconnecting.
To show how simple it is, let's do it in Bash!
count.sh:
#!/bin/bash
for ((COUNT = 1; COUNT <= 10; COUNT++)); do
echo $COUNT
sleep 1
doneBefore turning it into a WebSocket server, let's test it from the command line. The beauty of websocketd is that servers work equally well in the command line, or in shell scripts, as they do in the server - with no modifications required.
$ chmod +x count.sh
$ ./count.sh
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10Now let's turn it into a WebSocket server:
$ websocketd --port=8080 ./count.shFinally, let's create a web-page that to test it.
count.html:
<!DOCTYPE html>
<pre id="log"></pre>
<script>
// helper function: log message to screen
function log(msg) {
document.getElementById('log').textContent += msg + '\n';
}
// setup websocket with callbacks
var ws = new WebSocket('ws://localhost:8080/');
ws.onopen = function() {
log('CONNECT');
};
ws.onclose = function() {
log('DISCONNECT');
};
ws.onmessage = function(event) {
log('MESSAGE: ' + event.data);
};
</script>Open this page in your web-browser. It will even work if you open it directly
from disk using a file:// URL.
- Very simple install. Just download the single executable for Linux, Mac or Windows and run it. No dependencies, no installers, no package managers, no external libraries. Suitable for development and production servers.
- Server side scripts can access details about the WebSocket HTTP request (e.g. remote host, query parameters, cookies, path, etc) via standard CGI environment variables.
- As well as serving websocket daemons it also includes a static file server and classic CGI server for convenience.
- Command line help available via
websocketd --help. - Includes WebSocket developer console to make it easy to test your scripts before you've built a JavaScript frontend.
- Examples in many programming languages are available to help you getting started.
More documentation in the user manual
- Plot real time Linux CPU/IO/Mem stats to a HTML5 dashboard using websocketd and vmstat (for Linux)
- Remote JScript & VBScript code execution tool based on websocketd (for Windows)
Got more examples? Open a pull request.
- ReconnectingWebSocket - Simplest way to add some robustness to your WebSocket connections.
- Smoothie Charts - JavaScript charts for streaming data.
- Visit The Igloo Lab to see and subscribe to other thingies I make.
And follow @joewalnes!
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