CAUTION: DO NOT USE THIS SOFTWARE

The cube-cotillion library is a heavily Scotty-inspired framework for writing services over SSH.

Example

This example allows anyone to authenticate, and responds to two commands, greet and greet [name], with a short greeting.

{-# LANGUAGE OverloadedStrings #-}

module Main where

import Data.Monoid (mconcat)
import Network.CubeCotillion

main :: IO ()
main = do
  key <- loadKey "server-keys"
  cubeCotillion 8080 key $ do
    cmd "greet" $ do
      bs "Hello, world!\n"
    cmd "greet :name" $ do
      name <- param "name"
      bs $ mconcat ["Hello, ", name, "!\n"]

While running this service on localhost, we can connect to and use it like so:

[gdritter@mu ~]$ ssh -p 8080 localhost greet
Hello, world!
[gdritter@mu ~]$ ssh -p 8080 localhost greet Eberhardt
Hello, Eberhardt!

Why?

HTTP is often used as a protocol for exposing certain kinds of services, but HTTP also lacks certain kinds of built-in features, which are often reimplemented in various different ways: for example, connection multiplexing, compression of conveyed information, and user authentication and identity. All of these are features trivially supported by the SSH protocol already. Additionally, tools for working with SSH are ubiquitous, and developers often already have existing SSH identities.

That doesn't necessarily mean that SSH is a great protocol to use to build services on top of. I frankly don't know if that would be a good idea or not! That's why cube-cotillion exists: to experiment with building these kinds of services in a quick and easy way.

Why The Name?

The design of the library is heavily inspired by the lightweight Haskell web frameworks Scotty and Spock, both of which are named after Star Trek Characters. I figured I should follow suit, and choose the name of one of my favorite Star Trip characters, too.