The point of this is to allow your browser to "host" files which can be streamed over HTTP. This requires a proxy server to handle the HTTP requests and forward them to the browser over websockets.

Why would this be useful? If the user has a very large file (genomic data files can easily be in the 20GB-200GB range), and you want to make ranged requests to that file (ie only download specific chunks) as though it were hosted on a normal server, this will allow that.

NOTE: This is a very early work in progress and not intended to be used for anything production ready at the moment.

Example usage

First start up the proxy server. We'll assume it's publicly available at example.com. It's currently hard-coded to listen for HTTP on port 7000 and websocket connections on 8081.

node proxy/index.js

Create a "server" object in the browser:

const host = "example.com";
const rsServer = new reverserver.Server({ host, port: 8081 });

"Host" a couple files in the browser. See server/dist/index.html for an example where the user selects a file from their computer.

const file1 = new File(["Hi there"], "file1.txt", {
  type: "text/plain",
});

const file2 = new File(["I'm Old Gregg"], "file2.txt", {
  type: "text/plain",
});

rsServer.hostFile('/file1', file1);
rsServer.hostFile('/file2', file2);

Retrieve the files using any http client:

curl example.com:7000/file1
Hi there
curl example.com:7000/file2
I'm Old Gregg

Ranged requests work too:

curl -H "Range: bytes=0-2" example.com:7000/file1
Hi