web-repl

This is a Javascript REPL that runs in Ruby. Evaluation is done by a web browser instance.

One use of this is to control the Chrome Developer Console remotely.

Background

I was working on a toy program recently that needed the browser to be in full screen mode, which made using the regular Chrome console very difficult to use. I came up with this program as an alternative.

There are similar tools that run in nodejs for example but since my program uses a Ruby backend anyway, this is convenient for me.

It communicates over websocket.

There is basically no attention to security here, so please use at your own discretion.

Usage

Browser

To enable the browser side of this, include something like this in the head of your webpage:

<script src="js/replConnection.js"></script>
<script type="text/javascript">
  window.onload = function() {
    var repl = new ReplConnection("localhost", 9007, { debug: true, reconnect: true });
    repl.start();
  }
</script>

The javascript assets for this project are located in the /js directory.

There is also a full example of a webpage (with rack configuration) in the /examples/page directory

REPL

The REPL can be used either in a Ruby program/console or there is a "binary" Ruby script.

In Ruby the usage looks like this:

require "web-repl"

WebRepl.start(:host => "localhost", :port => 9007)

You can see an explanation of background usage here.

To use this as a script, run this from the command line. (The script should install with the gem)

web-repl localhost:9007

Installation

gem install web-repl

or with Bundler