wipes - Pipe text to a WebSocket server

Summary

wipes is a simple Go program that reads from STDIN and demuxes lines to open WebSockets. For convenience, it also serves files over HTTP (defaulting to the local directory) such that you can talk to the WS server easily.

Installation

$ go get github.com/gorilla/websocket
$ go build

Usage

The idea of wipes is that it's part of a command pipeline. Thus:

$ tail -f /var/log/messages | wipes -addr :8080

Will start an HTTP server on 8080 and serve files from the current directory. It will also make available the output of tail -f /var/log/messages available via WebSockets at ws://localhost:8080/_ws.

It's possible to serve a different directory:

$ tail -f /var/log/messages | wipes -static /var/www/wsapp

wipes will exit with status 0 when there's nothing left to read.

Examples

Anything that provides a constant stream of data makes sense to use here. In the examples directory, there's a simple HTML doc with a WS client that just displays a line at a time. To test it out, we'll make use of Meetup's streaming API, specifically, the /2/rsvps endpoint.

$ curl http://stream.meetup.com/2/rsvps | wipes -static examples

Then, open your browser to http://localhost:8080/lines.html. The result should be lines of JSON formatted text.

See Also

websocketd

Like inetd, but for WebSockets. Turn any application that uses STDIN/STDOUT into a WebSocket server.

websocketd

Contributing and Feedback

It's possible that wipes has bugs, and/or does something it shouldn't be, and/or has lots of room for improvement. If you'd like to fix or contribute something, please fork and submit a pull request, or open an issue.

If you have any other feedback, feel free to email me at the below address.

Authors

Andrew Gwozdziewycz [email protected]

Copyright

Copyright 2014, Andrew Gwozdziewycz, [email protected]

Licensed under the GNU GPLv3. See LICENSE for more details.