Run an existing CLI program on a web page

Question

This must be a solved problem, but Googling hasn't found me an answer.

I have an existing program with an interactive, text-only, command-line interface. I'd like to run this program on a web server so that each session gets a unique session of the CLI program, and each time a command is typed into the web page the corresponding response gets sent back.

I sorta-kinda know how to do this if the program were run fresh each time; what I'm looking for is how to do this so that the program keeps running (presumably in its own process), and the web page gets updates.

It'll be on a Linux box. Security hints would be helpful -- I'm hoping that I can run the program itself as a user that's tailored to have just enough privileges to actually run, but as little as possible otherwise to keep a hacker from getting in.

Answer 1

Try https://seashells.io/

Seashells lets you pipe output from command-line programs to the web in real-time, even without installing any new software on your machine. You can use it to monitor long-running processes like experiments that print progress to the console. You can also use Seashells to share output with friends!

$ echo 'Hello, Seashells!' | nc seashells.io 1337
serving at https://seashells.io/v/{random url}

Other article explaining seashells

Another alternative if you only want to see the result of the command, you can use websocketd