Reusing stdin after piping a program into Node.js

[alshdavid]

I am using Node.js as a plugin engine for a Rust program, using stdin and stdout to communicate with the child process.

I need to get node to run my glue code so the parent/child can communicate.

Generally, Node can accept a program via stdin, e.g.

echo "console.log(42)" | node

> 42

However when this is used by a parent program to inject glue code, stdin must be closed for Node.js to evaluate. This means stdin will no longer available to talk with the child process.

I have tried node -e "eval(atob('<base64-ecoded-string>'))" but this will likely fail because the script will be too long. Unfortunately (I guess for security reasons) -e is not available via NODE_OPTIONS so the only way to use Node as a plugin engine is to write a file to disk and tell Node to run that file.

Not terrible, but a but cumbersome.

Would be great if there was an alternative approach to using Node.js as a plugin runtime