Broadcast

Control the execution of a program via web interface.

Description

broadcast is a simple web application to control another executable program. There are 3 methods to do so:

1. directly, specifying the binary absolute path and all command line options
2. via a systemd unit, specifying the -systemd flag (and optionally the -systemd-as-user flag, to signal that the unit is a user one)
3. controlling an already existing docker container (note: it has to be already exinsting -although it can be paused- and have a name with the --name option)

The program exposes a web interface, defaulting on 0.0.0.0:8080, that can be specified using the -addr parameter.

Examples

For the sake of testing, this repository includes a simple program that prints a string every second: echo. We will use it in the following examples.

1. directly

broadcast /path/to/echo

2. systemd unit

Assuming an already existing unit named echo.service

broadcast -systemd -systemd-as-user echo.service

3. docker container

Assuming there already exists a docker container, started for example with

docker run --name echo --rm -ti echo

broadcast -docker echo

Develop

The project includes a Makefile to ease some tasks. It is possible to begin a developing session, first building the needed images with

make dev-build

It is then possible to launch a docker compose stack with

make dev

In order to build the artifacts (output to bin/) (note that libsystemd-dev is a prerequisite)

make build

License

GPL-v3 or following.