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Monday, September 28, 2009

Making a Bash Script into a Web App

I recently wrote a nice little bash script at work that would check to see if a specified bit of information had been properly propagated through several tracking systems. It reduced about 10 minutes of work to about 30 seconds and I was thrilled to have extra time to sip my coffee. When I showed it off to my boss, he said, "Cool, but can you make it a web app?"

After a bit of digging, I figured it out and it's remarkably simple. Here's what you'll need:
  1. A web server capable of running PHP. I'm rocking XAMPP.
  2. A functioning bash script. Just make sure it's working when you run it from the command line. The output you see there is what you'll see when it's been web-app'd.
For the purposes of this article, I'll post a simple bit of PHP that will produce a web app version of ping. This code can be easily modified to display the output of any Bash command on a web page.
<html>
 <head>
  <title>Web Ping</title>
  <style type='text/css'>
   pre {
    background:black;
 border:1px lime solid;
 color:lime;
   }
   td {
    font-family:monospace;
   }
  </style>
 </head>
 <body>
  <?php

   # clean the strings to prevent injection attacks
   $BADCHARS='/[^\.\w]/';
   $HOST=preg_replace($BADCHARS, '', $_GET['host']);
   $C=preg_replace($BADCHARS, '', $_GET['c']);
   $I=preg_replace($BADCHARS, '', $_GET['i']);
 
   if ($I=="") { $I=1; } # assign default values
   if ($C=="") { $C=4; } # assign default values

   if ($HOST!="") { # this is where the magic happens
    echo '<pre>';
    $last_line = system('/bin/ping '.$HOST.' -c '.$C.' -i '.$I, $retval);
    echo '</pre>';
   }
 
  ?>
  <form action='ping.php' method='get'>
   <table>
    <tr>
     <td>Hostname/IP:</td><td><input type='text' name='host' value='<?php echo $HOST ?>'/></td>
    </tr>
 <tr>
  <td>count:</td><td><input type='text' name='c' value='<?php echo $C ?>' /></td>
 </tr>
 <tr>
  <td>interval:</td><td><input type='text' name='i' value='<?php echo $I ?>' /></td>
 </tr>
    <tr>
     <td colspan='2'>
      <input type='submit' value='Ping It' /><br><br><br>
     </td>
    </tr>
   </table>
  </form>
 </body>
</html>


Enjoy!
at 3:32 PM

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