stdinho

Every once in a while, you need to share with somebody stuff you don't currently have at hand. So, what do you do?

...

Unless it's just a matter of sending a link, you fetch it for them. This involves waiting until your PC finishes downloading/processing. Once you have fetched it, you send it to person who needs it. Also, sending it sometimes means to first upload it somewhere, so other person can download it from there. This uploading involves again unnecessary waiting. I was tired of these waitings...

Here's this pain and its removal visualized:

This tool skips the waiting part, by merging fetching + processing + sending. You can pipe any standard stream into this tool and it immediately makes it available via HTTP, as it goes in.

Here is it in action:

Install

Via Composer

composer global require ostrolucky/stdinho

Features

• Stdin. Most universal input.
• HTTP. Most universal network output.
• Async = non-blocking. Yes, in PHP.
• Cross-platform. Linux/MacOS/Windows.
• Buffers to temp before client is connected, so no time between is wasted
• Shows detailed progress of stdin stream and progress of downloading by clients
• Detects MIME type and attaches it to HTTP response automatically. Streaming video? Browser detects it and plays it immediately.

Configuration

Just supply stdin or provide file via --file option to stdinho and that's all. There is option to specify IP/Port on which stdinho should listen at as well.

--file acts as a tee if both stdin and --file is provided

You can watch all available options by running.

$ stdinho --help

Example use cases

## Use case 1: Video streaming
# Server
$ stdinho 0.0.0.0:1337 < /file/to/a/movie.mp4
# Client
$ firefox http://127.0.0.1:1337

## Use case 2: Share application logs in realtime 
# Server
$ tail -f project/var/log/*.log|stdinho 0.0.0.0:1337
# Client
$ curl 127.0.0.1:1337 

## Use case 3: Stream a folder, including compressing
# Server
$ zip -qr - project|stdinho 0.0.0.0:1337 -f project.zip
# Client
$ curl 127.0.0.1:1337 -o project.zip # Saves it to project.zip

## Use case 4: Dump remote database and stream it to different database on the fly via middle man
# Server
$ ssh admin@example.com "mysqldump -u root -ptoor database|gzip -c"|stdinho 0.0.0.0:1337 -f "$(date).sql.gz" # also saves the backup locally
# Client
$ curl 127.0.0.1:1337|gunzip|mysql -u root -ptoor database # Import it directly to local DB

## Use case 5: 
#   There is bad connectivity between A (public server) and B (user connected to network via special VPN), 
#   but good connectivity between A and C (on same local network as A, but not public). 
#   However, B and C are behind NAT in separate networks, so there is no direct connection between them.
#   Here D is introduced, which is public server having good connection to both C and B, but no connection to A. 
#   In final, download stream goes like this: A -> C -> D -> B which bypasses connection problem between A and B and NAT issue at the same time
#   This problem is basically animation shown in introduction of this README.
# C:
$ ssh -NR \*:1337:localhost:1337 D #Reverse tunnel. Note: GatewayPorts cannot be set to "no" in D's sshd_config
$ curl http://A.com/big_file.tar.gz|stdinho 0.0.0.0:1337
# B:
$ curl D:1337 -o big_file.tar.gz

Licensing

GPLv3 license. Please see License File for more information.

See also

• inetd - Really old general purpose server, it's preinstalled on BSDs. I don't recommend to use it though if you don't have time to play around ;) You will have to write config for it, simple bash script and write HTTP headers by hand. And you will have no monitoring at hand.
• websocketd If you need to serve output of a program over websockets instead of HTTP