vanstee / switchboard

Responding to HTTP requests the old school way with simple commands.

Switchboard

Responding to HTTP requests the old school way with simple commands.

Switchboard converts HTTP requests into environment variables and data on STDIN, fires up a command matching a specified route, and STDOUT is parsed along with the exit status and is turned back into an HTTP response.

Here's an example. Let's start with a minimal config to define a route and a command. You can put this in a file named config.yaml if you're following along locally.

routes:
  "/hello":
    command:
      inline: |
        #!/usr/bin/env bash

        echo "hello world"

There. We've got a command that returns hello world wired up to the route /hello. So if we start Switchboard with this config and make a request to /hello, the response should be hello world. Let's try it out.

In one shell run the following to install and start Switchboard with our config.

go install github.com/vanstee/switchboard
switchboard -c config.yaml

And then in another shell, make the request to /hello.

$ curl -i http://localhost:8080/hello                                                                                                                                                               
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Sun, 04 Mar 2018 04:01:41 GMT
Content-Length: 12
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8

hello world

And there you have it, responding to HTTP requests using nothing but a command the writes to STDOUT.

Take a look in the examples directory for details on more advanced features like setting HTTP status codes, reading data from a POST request, nesting routes, and running commands in Docker containers.