Show HN: Wipes – pipe stdin to your browser over websockets | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Wipes – pipe stdin to your browser over websockets

github.com

31 pointsapgwoz11 comments

I did something related, but by running a command repeatedly like Unix watch(1): https://github.com/jzwinck/wswatch

Nice project. How does buffering work? Does it queue input lines until a browser connects to the websocket server? If multiple browsers are connected, will it broadcast all stdin lines to all connections?

It's not clear to me from the README whether I need to write my own HTML/JS to consume the websockets data. Does it maybe serve a minimal HTML page by default?

As feedback, I agree with other commenters that it would be better to make file serving an explicit option instead of default enabled.

It throws away the data if there are no consumers. This probably isn't the best idea, but it's simplest. I'll think a bit about alternatives.

And,at this point you need to write your own consumer. The project started because I want to do some real-time visualization from a program written in C. There's a switch which turns on verbose metrics which I can then pipe to wipes.

Got it. You mind find that wipes would be more similar to other tools that read from STDIN (cat, tail, etc.) if it implements "back pressure" by not reading from STDIN until it has an output to write to. To the user it would appear that wipes is blocking on receiving a websocket connection.

I'm not sure I like it serving files from the current directory by default - maybe with an extra flag instead?

This isn't meant to be a tool for production usage. It's meant to be a quick "I need to pipe this data into the browser quick for testing / visualization."

Though, I am curious -- why do you dislike "." by default?

I am sure I saw similar tool months ago on HN. Someone commented that it looks like inetd in disguise.

You probably mean websocketd? Yes, this is really quite similar, but also much simpler.

> Show HN: Wipes – pipe sdtin to your browser over websockets

"sdtin" should be "stdin"

Thanks!

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