Front-Terminal

Front-Terminal is a very lightweight terminal server that provides remote CLI via standard web browser and HTTP protocol. It works on all operating systems supported by Node.js, it doesn't depend on native modules. Fast and easy to install. Supports mutiple sessions.

NOTE: It is not a TTY emulator. It doesn't support complex TTY interaction like in vi, nano and etc. It's good only for simple command/response cases. For fully featured TTY emulator I would suggest Wetty project.

Prerequisites

Node.js v0.10 or newer.

Installation

Install from npm:

$ npm install front-terminal -g

Usage Examples

Starting front-terminal:

$ front-terminal --port 8088

Open your favorite web browser, navigate to http://localhost:8088 and start playing with the browser based CLI.

Integrating front-terminal with front applications:

    var http        = require("http"),
        terminal    = require("front-terminal");

    var app = http.createServer(function (req, res) {
        res.writeHead(200, {"Content-Type": "text/plain"});
        res.end("Hello World\n");
    });
    
    app.listen(1337);
    console.log("Server running at http://127.0.0.1:1337/");
    
    terminal(app);
    console.log("Web-terminal accessible at http://127.0.0.1:1337/terminal");
    

Start the above application, then open your favorite browser and navigate to: http://localhost:8088/terminal

Features

Colors

Most of the display VT100 escape sequences are translated to HTML. However, Front-terminal doesn't present itself as TTY and therefore most programs won't output escape sequences to stdout unless they are explicitly instructed so.

Example configurations:

$ git config --global color.ui always

$ npm config set color always --global

Shell commands

To execute commands through a shell such as bash or cmd.exe (for windows), an environment variable have to be set:

$ export WEB_SHELL=bash

JavaScript REPL

To start the REPL, just type node without arguments in the browser. Type .exit to return to the command prompt. NOTE: REPL is executed on the server, not in the brwoser.

Issues

Commands that require interaction with TTY cause front-terminal to stop responding.

For instance, commands like sudo that require password from TTY directly cause front-terminal to stop responding. In this case the whole process has to be restarted.

The workaround for the time being is to issue sudo with -S argument to instruct sudo to ask for password on the standard IO. Example:

$ sudo -S apt-get install git-core

For Git, passwords have to be stored to avoid this problem:

$ git config credential.helper store

Security Considerations

Front-terminal does not provide embedded authentication and encryption mechanisms. Therefore, if the service is exposed to the Internet, it is strongly recommended to require TLS with client certificates or VPN connection.

Sources

This software is based on Web-terminal