After some recent comments about having a separate program running alongside Codea (on iPad) for debugging purposes and things like that I thought I’d make a start.
I hope to integrate some sort of OSC support within the webpage at some point to allow bi-directional communication between the browser and the running Codea instance but this is certainly a start
So here it is, a very simple web server that serves a web page to a browser running alongside Codea:
-- Basic Web Server
local socket = require("socket")
— This is the served content
local body = [[
Hello Codea World!
]]
local function webserver_update()
-- wait for a connection from any client
local client = server:accept()
if client then
-- Make sure we don't take too long to respond to the client
client:settimeout(1 / 60)
-- Receive the request
local line, err = client:receive()
-- If no error then send our response
if not err then
client:send("HTTP/1.0 200 Success \\r\
\\r\
" .. body)
end
-- Close the client object
client:close()
end
end
local function webserver_loop()
-- This is beautiful if I do say so myself...
-- This will 'always' fail (as long as the silly url doesn't exist)
-- so the fail callback will always be called outside of our main update loop.
http.request("http://imnotarealurl.lua", function() end, function()
webserver_update()
webserver_loop() — Loop again!
end)
end
function setup()
server = assert(socket.bind("127.0.0.1", 8888))
server:settimeout(0.001) -- minimise waiting
local ip, port = server:getsockname()
print("Connect to http://" .. ip .. ":" .. port)
-- Kick off the async web server loop
webserver_loop()
end
function draw()
background(128)
end
I’m also incredibly pleased with how well the async update loop ‘hack’ panned out. It runs totally asynchronous to the main project loop!
Hopefully this is useful to some of you.
Cheers,
Steppers
UPDATE 15-Nov-2021:
Version 1.1.0 is also available on WebRepo
@Steppers - this looks amazing. Need to play with this a little to understand just what I can use it for.
On the bi-directional idea that has already been implemented in Codea with Aircode in that you can link to an editor in a browser on a PC/Mac. I still use it occasionally but it is a bit prone to crashing as it is live linked coding.
I think a better idea would be a module for an external editor where updates are not immediate but posted when ‘complete’. You could potentially use one of many editors like Notepad+, Visual Code etc etc.
Downloaded the web repo version, but the server doesn’t load. I get the message “Safari cannot open the page because it could not contact to the server”.
@Steppers I don’t understand what the do…end blocks are about. That seems to be a trick that I don’t know.
It’d be good to see an example of setting up the resources, but I can probably fumble my way through …
I’ve not used socket. It seems that client:receive() is adding a blank at the end of the input? I can’t find any docs that suggest that happens. I’d appreciate some hints as I play with this. Thanks!
@RonJeffries the do … end blocks just create a scope for the local variable so it doesn’t stick around afterwards.
As for the resources, local server = WebServer(asset.documents["web-server"], 80) will start a web server that serves html files from the web-server folder inside Codea’s folder in the files app. By default if you pass it a blank path, say http://localhost/ rather than http://localhost/test.html then it will serve an index.html file if one’s available.
Btw, if you put the urls in their own print() statement they can be copied directly from the output panel, letting people then paste them right into their browser.
(The copying is a hidden feature I only learned about in the last few months, and I’ve been coming here for years.)
