Posted by mrcslws 3 hours ago
The tool from OP and WAC are pretty similar in terms of functionality and usecase. Why would you want this? Well, imagine your team needing to be able to do server functions but you have less technical team members to do it for you, which is very often the case in big places, most people are familiar with the web browser and having a website to do these sorts of actions makes it easier to have things done in one place without a lot of tools like Remote Desktop, SSH, WinRM, etc. configured.
If so how would that work on non Apple devices? Also how much will that sandbox protect you?
As someone managing various servers, both at home and at work, I see how this can be really useful. I see it not in the production space yet but rather in the experimenting, using a Linux machine as a second compute device!
So regarding your last point, I'm convinced. I think it is useful! The one fact that is bugging me is that now it requires a client specific app, with GUI, on my PC and I wonder if using ssh port forwarding could reduce the surface. I mean I wonder if either having a rich client that executes commands via ssh or a rich server (including Web Server) with ssh port wouldn't suffice, so that I can avoid installing stuff on the server AND on my computer.
Cool idea anyway, no shade here.
Dependencies are less of a concern for the frontend binaries. For backends, I use a dependency-light approach, static-linking anything that's needed. Of course, people are welcome to do backends however they want, and just tell Outer Shell about the systemd/launchd units via the API. I used this no-dependency approach to keep everything lightweight and to keep install steps trivial, but admittedly it pushes me in certain directions (for example, using custom binary formats rather than sqlite).