Hacker News Reader

Comment by wolletd | Hacker News Reader

I have systems that have no web server and don't need one and adding one would add complexity and potential security risks to the system. Administration is only done via SSH.

There are just situations where the question goes the other way around: Is there any need for _more_ than a command line interface? No. Anyone competent enough to do anything meaningful on that server is also capable of doing it via command line.

View on HN

I don't disagree with you, I'm just devil's advocating/showing an alternative viewpoint:

> Is there any need for _more_ than a command line interface?

Reworded: is there any need to make this harder to access than the equivalent of:

* kube-forwarder + open Chrome to http://localhost:3000

* ssh -L ...

* ngrok ...

All of the things you listed are still additional steps compared to just ssh and run the cli tool. Web UIs are nice too, for some things. But for many things, for at lot of us, the cli is where it’s at. And that is where it will continue to be.

We use Web UIs for some things, and cli tools for other things.

From my point of view, I'm not actively making it harder, I just don't make it as simple.

My development process usually starts in the terminal, as I am a terminal user and do iterative development there as well as tinkering with system interfaces.

A CLI is the natural first product of my development. Building a web interface is additional work. Also, it's been a decade since I have written any reasonable web frontend.

Granted, it's not a real TUI with curses and stuff, but I like to do some eye-candy with escape sequences. Because I am the most frequent user of my tools and I always like seeing something I deliberately made look good. :)

Thing is, if you can establish an SSH connection to the target machine, you can easily tunnel HTTP over that. And it doesn't need to have a dedicated web server service for that; the app can embed a localhost-only HTTP server directly.

One could argue that this is extra complexity... but I don't think this argument flies in comparison to "React for CLI", especially once you take into account all the dependencies.

Not every sshd is configured to allow port forwarding. In fact, I'd expect that on critical systems this is explicitly forbidden.

It's largely pointless to forbid it because once you have a byte stream (which you obviously do with ssh), you can tunnel whatever you want over it anyway. SSH own docs even point this out; man sshd_config(5):

"Note that disabling TCP forwarding does not improve security unless users are also denied shell access, as they can always install their own forwarders."

Reply on news.ycombinator.com