Comment by Lerc

I think this is broadly similar to a thing I built as a Proof of Concept a while ( eek youtube video is 11 years old, time does fly) ago. It had a server that only listened on localhost and required a reverse proxy to make it available via https. Numerous one line commands could do that job.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7namj7iy16Y&t=60s

Going to a native, but still browser-ish, client might simplify it somewhat as a ssh rather than https program, electron didn't exist when I started on this thing though.

If you go to the simple tick demo around 7 minutes in https://youtu.be/7namj7iy16Y?t=433 It shows a minimal node app running and connecting to the socket indicated by process.env.WEBSESSION to open a window on the client and sends it the webpage to handle it's own output.

I have been recently revisiting some of the ideas here using web technologies that have been created since (using promises, web-components for the window). At the moment I'm doing the whole thing client side, which actually makes it a completely different beast. I think both browser hosted backend, or real machine hosted backend have merit, but somewhat incompatible. I'm still pondering how to reconcile this.

The entirely browser side means you can host a command line environment on neocities https://lerc.neocities.org/ (has a bug where you need to reload the page once to get it working, but then it's good) It is also very much just proof-of-concept.

If you try the client thing out on neocities. Some command suggestions that reveal some of the subtleties.

    foo
    bar
    ls -al /bin
    view /res/image/slice8.webp
    cat terminal.html |hd