Ask HN: Query about local-first web development
Local-first web development seems to be something which I need for solving a problem which I am facing, ALMOST!!
It will be great if someone here guides me on how I can solve this below problem.
I am part of a Enterprise company which installs a bunch of managed security softwares in employees' laptops. A couple of these security softwares can/must be used in BYODs as well, to connect to the company network.
I would like to build a application such that, whenever a employee finds that something is not working right on their laptop, they should be able to fire it up on their browser and it will access logs from these security software and does troubleshooting/debugging locally on the machine and provides the results and remediation steps to the person. This will tremendously save time instead of contacting IT team and waiting for their help.
For this usecase, I have some limitations.
1) I want to be able to solve for both managed laptops and BYODs (both Mac and Windows). So I cannot push this as a desktop application using MDM solution.
I want this to be a web-app as I can control the version of the application that they are running. So a local-first web app seems perfect in that sense.
2) I want to be able to access local file system where the logs of these security software are located. I am not a developer, but rather a infra guy, but based on what I know, a web-app cannot access the file system without user actually doing a file picker. But in this case, it is too much friction for non-technical users, especially since I want to build this solution for multiple security software which is dependent on multiple file location.
3) Moreover, I don't want to unnnecessarily reveal too much information of location of the log files for the security softwares. But if it is a local-first "web-app" and the user has to be pick the file using a dialog box, I cannot do it without revealing the location.
4) For "some" use cases, I want to be able to "securely" send meta data to a centralized server for more complex troubleshooting scenarios or to log a ticket, for example.
Can someone please give me pointers on how I can solve this?