htttee - unix's tee-as-a-service

$ man tee
NAME
     tee -- pipe fitting
DESCRIPTION
     The tee utility copies standard input to standard output, making a copy in zero or more files.  The output is unbuffered.

It's very handy for piping the output of a script to a file and to STDOUT simultaneously.

Instead of piping to a file, htttee pipes to a web service. Consumers can then stream the piped output via the htttee command line. Alternately, the streamed output could be viewed within a browser.

That is, a streaming output locked within a server can be made accessible to a console or browser via htttee.

In one terminal:

ruby -e "STDOUT.sync = true; 1.upto(100) {|i| puts i; sleep(i/100.0)}" | \
  htttee -e http://localhost:3000 -u SOMEUNIQUESTRING

In another terminal:

curl http://localhost:3000/SOMEUNIQUESTRING

Or to see the chunked information:

$ telnet localhost 3000

Then enter:

GET /1234 HTTP/1.1
Host: localhost

You will then see a flow of integers being chunked preceded by the size of the chunks. Here is the final few numbers chunked through:

3
98

3
99

4
100

0

Connection closed by foreign host.

Some browsers don't behave well when recieving a chunked response of plain/text data. For example, lots of them buffer the first 256 bytes or so before doing anything. SSE is used to get around this browser limitation. If the request for a stream originates from a browser that supports SSE and the request is for 'text/html' then SSE setup page is returned. That page has a little javascript for setting up the stream and parsing the events. The simplicity of the SSE protocol makes it difficult to sanely send newline characters. So there is a ctrl event has been added that makes it easy to send newline characters and other 'special' characters. This could even allow for terminal emulation in the future.

git clone git://github.com/benburkert/htttee.git
cd htttee
bundle
script/server

To pull down the repository and run the test suite:

git clone git://github.com/benburkert/htttee.git
cd htttee
bundle
rake

To install the gem locally from source:

rake install

To release the gem:

rake release

Copyright (c) 2011 Ben Burkert, ben@benburkert.com

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.