wcat - web cat

wcat is a webapp and cli tool which allows you to send small files to your browser to be previewed, such as images or pdfs, while navigating a remote machine with ssh.

It is also possible to drop a file in the browser and download it from the terminal.

It's intended to help bridge the gap between cli and gui by reducing the need to open new terminals just to rsync small files back and forth.

Setup the server

The easiest way to run the server is using docker:

docker run -d --name wcat -p "8085:8085" olicoad/wcat:latest

Setup the cli tool

Download the pre-compiled cli tool from the server. For example, on linux:

wget http://localhost:8085/clitool/wcat-linux-amd64 -O ~/bin/wcat
chmod +x ~/bin/wcat

Make sure that ~/bin or wherever you downloaded the file to is in PATH.

Usage

Run wcat just like you would use cat to preview files.

wcat example.jpg

Just like cat, if no files are specified, wcat listens on stdin

echo "hello world" | wcat

To send a file back from the browser, click "Show Dropzone" and drop a file in. Then download the latest dropped file using wcat.

wcat download # default output-document is ./[filename]

Usage on a remote machine

It is recommended to use cli tool on the same machine that the server is running. You can use SSH Port Forwarding to access the preview in your browser.

ssh -L 127.0.0.1:8085:127.0.0.1:8085 example.com

Alternatively, if you don't have docker on the remote machine, you can run the server on your local machine and reverse port forward so that the cli tool on the remote machine can access the server.

ssh -R 127.0.0.1:8085:127.0.0.1:8085 example.com

Libraries

The pywcat package makes it easy to send previews to wcat from python.

Example usage

Use guff in svg mode and pipe output into wcat

wc -l *.c | grep -v total | sort -nr | awk '{print($1)}' | ./guff -s -m line -r | wcat

Development

This project is build on the SAFE Stack. It was created using the dotnet SAFE Template. If you want to learn more about the template why not start with the quick start guide?

The cli tool is build with go.

Install pre-requisites

Only needed for development

You'll need to install the following pre-requisites in order to build SAFE applications

• The .NET Core 3.1 SDK
• FAKE 5 installed as a global tool
• The Yarn package manager (you can also use npm but the usage of yarn is encouraged).
• Node LTS installed for the front end components.
• If you're running on OSX or Linux, you'll also need to install Mono.

You'll also need to install go in order to build the cli tool.

Work with the application

Fake is used to concurrently watch all components of wcat. It will concurrently run the server and frontend in watch mode and go install the cli tool whenever there are changes:

fake build -t Run

Docker

You can use the included Dockerfile to build everything using docker.

docker build -t wcat .

SAFE Stack Documentation

You will find more documentation about the used F# components at the following places:

• Saturn
• Fable
• Elmish
• Fulma

If you want to know more about the full Azure Stack and all of it's components (including Azure) visit the official SAFE documentation.

Troubleshooting

• fake not found - If you fail to execute fake from command line after installing it as a global tool, you might need to add it to your PATH manually: (e.g. export PATH="$HOME/.dotnet/tools:$PATH" on unix) - related GitHub issue

Try it with Gitpod

It should automatically install all dependencies and run dotnet fake build -t run.

This is the full developer environment including hot reloading client, live reloading server, and automatically installing the cli tool on code changes.

Just wait a couple minutes for everything to compile and run, open a terminal and try wcat.

wcat README.md