This is a multi user bash Terminal web app done in Ruby using Reel server. This will only run on a linux platform.

The server code is inside session. demo-app is the example front-end done in Rails that provides the Terminal webpage & also acts as proxy for the commands between the web page & the Terminal server. Typically you need the setup to keep all the user level information at the backend.

The purpose of this app is not to emulate a true Terminal. It is designed to let website owners give a web based Pseudo Terminal to their users to be able to run linux commands.

Note : security etc has not been taken care. Google for chroot & /etc/security/limits.conf to be able to jail users & limit their privileges.

#Installation

All the commands are logged in mongodb database. Read mongo-stuff/README.md to setup mongodb & moped Ruby driver, if you have not already set it up.

If you do not want to log the data, you can remove lines with $mongodb_session = ... inside session/sample/reel-server.rb & it will be fine. Also remove require 'moped' as you most probably will not have the Ruby gem installed either.

Install the gems for demo-app which is the example app that uses Terminal server

cd demo-app
bundle install
cd ..

Install the gems for Terminal server

sudo su 	#the app needs to run as super user to be able to switch the user as 'su'
gem install reel
gem install json
gem install eye

cd session/sample
eye l test.eye
eye start test

This will run the Terminal server at port 3001. To see if the server has started, just do

ps -ef | grep ruby

There should be an entry like ruby reel-server.rb. It means the Terminal server is running. session/sample/reel-server.rb is the file where all the magic happens.

To stop the server, run

eye stop test

Eye is a process monitoring tool http://github.com/kostya/eye . I included it to monitor memory leaks in the server & restart the server if it dies. The logs are in session/sample/eye.log . The server logs is in session/sample/reel-server.log

This starts the Terminal server. To be able to see the Terminal in action, the demo-app directory is included.

Inside app/controller/terminals_controller.rb, change "pocha" to the linux username of your PC

def current_user
	"pocha"
end

Open another terminal & run rails server from inside demo-app

cd demo-app
thin start

Used thin instead of Webrick as Webrick did not support parallel requests

Now open http://localhost:3000/ on your browser & start fiddling.

P.S. - if you see garbled prompt, backup your .bashrc & copy the .bashrc from here to your linux user home directory

cp ~/.bashrc ~/.bashrc-bkup
cp .bashrc ~/.bashrc

.bashrc is used to calculate $PS1 . Colored $PS1 might lead to garbled prompt.

#Test Setup

Stress test the server with multiple users sending requests in parallel through siege

cd stress-tests
# install siege from the source siege-2.55.tar.gz
sudo su
ruby multi-user-stress-test.rb #you need to be root as the script creates multiple users on your linux machine & deletes at the end of the tests

Rspec test for multi Terminal per user

cd demo-app
rspec spec/requests/multi_terminals_spec.rb