FireIPC

Addon that defines a simple TCP based inter-process communication protocol that greasemonkey userscripts can use to send and receive messages to other processes in the filesystem.

By default, it starts a TCP server in localhost:61155 in which newline-separated (ASCII 10) JSON objects are sent and received. Valid double-quoted JSON strings are also accepted. The special value 0 (zero as an integer) closes the connection, this is useful to send simple messages with netcat:

echo -e '"hello"\n0' | nc localhost 61155

This sends the JSON objects "hello" and 0. Userscripts receive the first one and the connection is closed with the second one.

An userscript API is provided which can be @require'd. Example usage:

var fipc = new FireIPC();
fipc.setup(function(ready){
  if(!ready){
    console.log("Error!");
    return;
  }
  fipc.listen(function(msg){
    console.log(msg);
  })
  fipc.emit({"data": "hello world!"});
});

At the moment there's no authentication or filtering of messages - every message is broadcasted to every listener on both sides. For this reason the API is considered unstable, at least until we decide wtf to do with that.

Probably doing @require of a github /raw/ url for a fixed commit might help keeping a stable API. Maybe.

Build

• Install the firefox addon SDK
• Run the bin/activate script as indicated by the docs.
• Run cfx xpi