transterminal is a utility that can be used to share a virtual terminal with anyone over the internet. You run the transterminal.py Python script on a "server" machine, and "clients" can access the virtual terminal the server provides through a website hosted by a separate webserver.
Changes to one terminal are replicated on everyone else's terminals. If one user types a character, everyone else sees what was typed. If something is printed to the terminal, it shows up on everyone's terminal.
This was mainly written as a kind of proof of concept, so it doesn't have very many features, isn't really that secure, and could probably be optimised a bit.
this utility allows you to share access to your computer with anyone on the internet. If transterminal is hosting a shell program like bash or zsh, anyone who can access your server can do anything they could if they were physically using a terminal on your computer. Be very careful when exposing this server to the public internet.
the main transterminal server can be launched by running python transterminal.py. you can pass arguments to the script to set a few options. There are only three options at the minute (which are all optional), which are:
| argument | default | description |
|---|---|---|
-h |
print these options + usage | |
--ws_port |
5678 | specify the websocket port |
[cmd] |
zsh |
the command to host |
The client webpage has to be hosted using a separate HTTP or HTTPS webserver. When a client connects to the web server, they can specify their name, and give a user colour. These are shown in the top right of every user's screen (it shows who is currently connected to the transterminal server). You can also specify a custom Websocket port number or host url.
in theory, one person could host the transterminal server, and each client could locally host their own client webserver. alternatively, one person can host both servers, which everyone connects to.
extrascontains the transterminal logo in png and svg formattestscontains the programs i used to test stdin/stdout capture and websocket stuff, and are mainly kept for archive purposesweb_interfacecontains all the files needed for the client web interfacereadme.mdis this filetransterminal.pyis the main "entrypoint" to the server program. it just parses command line arguments, then launches the server fromtransserver.pytransserver.pyis the file that contains the actual server code. all of the parts are wrapped up into one big class calledtransterminal
The main server program is a Python script that uses Pexpect to spawn and control a specified process. The stdout of the process is sent using the websockets library, which is also used to receive data that is sent to the processes stdin.
The client side is written in vanilla JavaScript. It uses the WebSockets API built into JavaScript. The terminal is rendered using Xterm.js.
When a user types a character into the client terminal, the character is sent to the server and send to the stdin of the process. This is echoed to the processes stdout, which is then sent to each of the users connected to the server. The effect of this is that when a user types a character, it shows up on everyone's terminal.