Socket2me

Execute Javascript in the browser from the server using WebSockets.

This is a proof of concept. There are no attempts to secure this feature or even make it practical in a multi-user environment. That's right, any browser that is viewing the site is going to get the same javascript executed on it. This gem should really only ever be used in development.

The original use for this was to send all logs to browser as it was appended.

def pipe_to_browser(src)
  File.open(src,"r") do |f|
    f.seek(0,IO::SEEK_END)
    while true do
      IO.select([f])    # wait for change
      line = f.gets
      Socket2me.exec_js "$('#logs').append(#{line.to_json})"
    end
  end
end
Thread.new{pipe_to_browser('log/development.log')}

Please don't run this in production. Ever.

Installation

Add this line to your application's Gemfile:

group :development, :test do
  gem 'socket2me'
end

And then execute:

$ bundle

Or install it yourself as:

$ gem install socket2me

Usage

A full rack example is in examples/dummy.ru. That app simply creates an HTML page and provides a helper js function to display some output. The example then outputs the server time every second in a background thread.

To run examples/dummy.ru:

1. checkout the project: git clone https://github.com/ddrscott/socket2me
2. go into the the socket2me directory: cd socket2me
3. install requirements: ./bin/setup
4. start a rack server with the example: rackup examples/dummy.ru

Rack

# config.ru
use SocketToMe::Middleware::AddScriptTag

Rails

# config/environments/development.rb
config.middleware.use SocketToMe::Middleware::AddScriptTag

Execute Javascript

# elsewhere.rb
SocketToMe.exec_js "alert('hello world!')"

Development

After checking out the repo, run bin/setup to install dependencies. Then, run rake spec to run the tests. You can also run bin/console for an interactive prompt that will allow you to experiment.

To install this gem onto your local machine, run bundle exec rake install. To release a new version, update the version number in version.rb, and then run bundle exec rake release, which will create a git tag for the version, push git commits and tags, and push the .gem file to rubygems.org.

Spot check everything works by running rackup examples/dummy.ru. The browser should continually append a timestamp below the header.

Contributing

Bug reports and pull requests are welcome on GitHub at https://github.com/ddrscott/socket2me.

License

The gem is available as open source under the terms of the MIT License.