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Comment by reustle | Hacker News Reader

Requires Ruby? Why...

Chrome extensions can't access the local filesystem so we have to start a tiny webserver in the background.

If someone knows a way around this limitation, or a simpler webserver to require / embed, I would be thrilled. But so far this is the best I've found.

ahahahahah what? Dude, do you work for Microsoft? "Well see, we just have to run MS-SQL server (DESKTOP OMG EXPRESS ENGINE) here, and then we run IIS on top of it to serve this file listing..."

He co-founded GitHub and is the CEO presently. That will be good enough for you?

It's a limitation of Chrome. This isn't the first time that someone tried to use a local webserver to do something that Chrome doesn't allow. IIRC, there was someone that used a webserver to implement a hacky version of It'sAllText! for Chrome.

Did you investigate requesting the files directly from the filesystem, like "file:///home/monkey/.js/google.com.js".

You'd need to tell users to enable file access for the extension though chrome://extensions/, since that isn't enabled by default and users have to opt into it. I also don't know if there is a way to get the current user's homedir without hardcoding it.

Also: you're being super careful to not allow arbitrary reading of the filesystem, right? A good sanity check would be to ensure that realpath() of any file served is under ~/.js before handing it off.

It looks like Ruby is only needed for the file server. You could easily substitute a Python file server (cd .js; python -m SimpleHTTPServer 3131). You could use a remote Apache server for synchronizing your scripts. I agree that Ruby is a little overkill, but it is simple enough to run easily on a Mac, and it is extensible for hackers.

If you use your own server make sure you set the Access-Control-Allow-Origin header:

https://github.com/defunkt/dotjs/blob/master/bin/djsd#L26

(Also, Ruby comes with OS X (just like Python) so it seemed a sane choice.)

But Python comes with OSX and Ubuntu

But Ruby is the language the developer uses when doing something basic like this?

Python usually, as far as I can tell. Either language is fine, I just think these things should be done in something that comes pre-installed on more systems.

Feel free to fork the project and make it Python-based. defunkt works at Github and does most of his work in Ruby from what I can see.

I mean, I knew Chris years ago and his language of choice was Ruby, and I don't think it's changed.

Sure basic install-ability is great, but I bet you this tool was made to satiate an itch he had, and he used the tools he's used to. Little apps like these aren't engineered. Just hacks, for hacks sake.

Installing ruby on Ubuntu is easy. Most users of this kind of extension would probably know how.

Sounds like a relatively easy way to replace dependence on Ruby would be to just load the scripts directly from one's GitHub repo, where all your scripts can be easily synchronized.

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