How does this work?

See pyxterm for the original idea that this is based on.

In summary:

• A Flask server is running
• The Flask server uses flask-socketio, a websocket library for Flask and socketio
• A pty ("pseudo-terminal") is spawned that runs bash.
  • You can think of a pty as a way to serialize/deserialize a terminal session. The Python docs describe it as "starting another process and being able to write to and read from its controlling terminal programmatically".

On the frontend:

• Xterm.js is used to render Xterm output data in the browser.
  • This means escape codes used by terminals to control the cursor location, color, and other options can be passed directly to Xterm.js and Xterm.js will faithfully render them as a terminal would.
  • Output from the pty process on the backend is fed into it.
  • Input from the browser is passed via websocket to the pty's input

Quick Deploy with uWSGI

uwsgi --http :4555 --gevent 1000 --http-websockets --master --wsgi-file wsgi.py --callable app --stats 127.0.0.1:9191 

uWSGI options --http :4555 Tell uWSGI to run a http server with the callable wsgi application --wsgi-file Relative/absolute path to the wsgi file that imports the callable FLASK application --callable Callable Flask application --http-websockets Enable web socket communication

Nginx uwsgi Deployment

Please make use of the pyxterm.ini file for uWSGI configuration and the nginx.conf file for NGINX configuration.

Option 2 (Quickest but not recommended)

Clone this repository, enter the pyxtermjs directory, create a virtual environment (python3 -m venv venv), activate it (source venv/bin/activate) then run

pip install -r requirements.txt
python -m pyxtermjs

Documentation

>> pyxtermjs --help
usage: pyxtermjs [-h] [-p PORT] [--debug] [--version] [--command COMMAND]
                 [--cmd-args CMD_ARGS]

A fully functional terminal in your browser.
http://gitsrv/algerchen/pyxtermjs

optional arguments:
  -h, --help            show this help message and exit
  -p PORT, --port PORT  port to run server on (default: 5000)
  --debug               debug the server (default: False)
  --version             print version and exit (default: False)
  --command COMMAND     Command to run in the terminal (default: bash)
  --cmd-args CMD_ARGS   arguments to pass to command (i.e. --cmd-args='arg1
                        arg2 --flag') (default: )