chrome.terminalPrivate source

[Randall Underwood]

Hi there,

  I was playing with making hterm work on a webpage instead of as a chrome extension. It looks like chosh.html is a reasonable starting point -- is the source to chrome.terminalPrivate still available somewhere? (If not then I'm sure I can get something going, but it'd obviously be easier with the reference ;) ).

Thanks!

 Randall

[Robert Ginda]

chrome.terminalPrivate exists, but it's native code only available to the Secure Shell chrome extension, and only on Chrome OS.  I don't think it'd be much help in your case.  It just opens a process to "/usr/bin/crosh" and provides a way to stream stdin/stdout over the C++ to JS boundary.

You may get more benefit from nassh_stream.js, nassh_stream_google_relay.js and nassh_google_relay.js.  These work together to marshal the ssh connection over traditional web transports.  There is an implementation that works over HTTP using XHR, and one using WebSockets.

The easiest way to get things working in a web page may be to write a server that works like the google relay server.  See this part of the FAQ:

  86 > But, what if I *want* to ssh over HTTP?

  87 

  88   Secure Shell also knows how to connect to an HTTP-to-ssh relay that was

  89   built inside Google.  Unfortunately that relay isn't open source, and Google

  90   doesn't maintain a public pool of relays.

  91 

  92   However, you're free to build one that works the same way.  There should be

  93   enough documentation in nassh_google_relay.js to reverse engineer a

  94   compatible relay.

  95 

  96   If you're interested in writing an alternative relay library, please mention

  97   it on the mailing list.

Rob.

[Jeff Bailey]

Do you need the actual SSH part of it?  If not, chrome.terminalPrivate isn't needed at all.  You can see how I used hterm for a NaCl-based port of Nethack at https://github.com/kaladron/nethack-nacl/blob/master/win/nacl/index.html

Jeff Bailey | Software Engineer | jeffb...@google.com | Google

On Tue, Oct 9, 2012 at 3:31 PM, Randall Underwood <randa...@gmail.com> wrote:

[Jeff Bailey]

Isn't it also using that for the sockets?  If it's just stdin/stdout, you could do that use jspipemount from nacl-mounts without anything special (that's how I'm doing it for Nethack and how Brad implemented NaclForth)

Jeff Bailey | Software Engineer | jeffb...@google.com | Google

[Robert Ginda]

It's only using it for stdin/out.  Crosh (the troubleshooting shell you get on Chrome OS when you hit Ctrl-Alt-T) has nothing at all to do with NaCl.  The point is to run "/usr/bin/crosh" to open a shell on the actual device, and NaCl very explicitly doesn't help with that.

Rob.

[Jeff Bailey]

Makes sense.  I'd forgotten that even existed. =)

Jeff Bailey | Software Engineer | jeffb...@google.com | Google

[Randall Underwood]

No, I was planning on wrapping a pty in node or similar, and exposing it to hterm via XHR (and not doing SSH). I did a little terminal on Android before and probably the code is similar, but I didn't detect the pty requesting a resize (which it looks like terminalPrivate does do), so the c++ code would be handy; sorry for not being clearer :).

Randall

[Robert Ginda]

Here's the terminaPrivate implementation: http://src.chromium.org/viewvc/chrome/trunk/src/chrome/browser/extensions/api/terminal/terminal_private_api.cc?view=markup

[Robert Ginda]

FWIW, the NaCl ssh command also creates a ptty and deals with size changes and some additional tty state that crosh doesn't do.  The code for that is here: http://git.chromium.org/gitweb/?p=chromiumos/platform/assets.git;a=tree;f=chromeapps/ssh_client

Rob.