Re: Can I serve CLI Applications using Apache (Apache Users)

Thank you all. After working on my architecture, I have one more requirement.

It is the ADD_HTTP_RESPONSE_MESSAGE . I am using it to add HEADERS, response code etc. This is because I want the CLI apps to be totally independent. I do not want to add HTTP response messages to CLI_APP or ADD_UI output so that I can reuse these tools in case I decide to make a GUI app or mobile app or something later where HTTP is not involved. My question is, can I give apache ADD_HTTP_RESPONSE_MESSAGE instead of writing it on my own.

One more thing, will it be a bad idea to extend apache (ex. create a module) to serve my purpose? Is it possible to make a module that will give the HTTP request to `Command1 | Command2 | CommandN`, then build a response from the output (by adding HTTP response message to it) and then send the response back to the client.

Thanks and Best Regards,

Ahmad Ismail

On Thu, Jun 23, 2022 at 4:40 PM Yehuda Katz <yehuda@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

You still have a bunch of options. Some possibilities using your own code:

- Your CGI script or binary called by HTTPD is a wrapper which handles the piping and output capture of the other program.
- Your CGI script or binary uses the available environment variables to determine where it is running and outputs the appropriate format based on that.

If you start using other modules, you could look at PHP and the `exec` function which can easily do what you want.

- Y

Sent from a device with a very small keyboard and hyperactive autocorrect.

On Thu, Jun 23, 2022, 1:15 AM Ahmad Ismail <ismail783@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
I have already bumped into CGI (after asking the question here).

However, I have some issues with CGI. For example, I have to add HEADERS maintaining CRLF etc in the output. However, I want the CLI app to be totally independent. I mean, I want to output regular text or json without any header. So, what I really want is:

CLI_APP | ADD_UI | ADD_CGI_HEADER

Where CLI_APP gives me pure json. ADD_UI adds HTML, CSS, JS on the json output. And ADD_CGI_HEADER adds the extra stuff that is needed to make the final response sendable via the server.

Please note that when the user will send a request, it will have to go through the total pipeline. Also please note that, I can always call ADD_UI at the end of CLI_APP and call ADD_CGI_HEADER at the end of ADD_UI. But that way, I am not decoupling. And the later binaries will be dependent on the previous ones. This is not something I want. I want to pipe the outputs to get the final response.

How can I do that? Do I need to extend the apache server in any way (like creating any module or something like that).

Thanks and Best Regards,
Ahmad Ismail

On Wed, Jun 22, 2022 at 8:52 PM Eric Covener <covener@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
you can use CGI to prototype it, and FastCGI later for performance (if
it matters)

On Wed, Jun 22, 2022 at 10:28 AM Ahmad Ismail <ismail783@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
> I want to create a CLI app (in this case named CLI_APP), that will
> output json and can be accessed via web.
>
> In Linux terms, it will look like:
>
> Request | Web_Server | CLI_APP | ADD_UI | Web_Server > Response
>
> Now, I will run the app like `CLI_APP --output json`. Here, I am
> saying that the CLI_APP will output json (for REST API).
>
> Here, `ADD_UI --output web` will add HTML, CSS, JS etc. to the JSON output.
>
> Can apache help me send the requests to CLI_APP via STDIN and serve
> the final output of `ADD_UI --output web`?
>
> Thanks and Best Regards,
> Ahmad Ismail
>
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--
Eric Covener
covener@xxxxxxxxx

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