pipe child process stdout & stdin to browser in node.js & browserify

Question

pipe child process stdout & stdin to browser in node.js & browserify

8k Views Asked by ssarangi At 06 April 2025 at 16:27

I am attempting to pipe the stdout & stdin of a child_process to a browser & display it in an html page. I am using browserify to get node.js to run on the browser. My code for spawning the child_process is like this.

var child = require('child_process');

var myREPL = child.spawn('myshell.exe', ['args']);

 // myREPL.stdout.pipe(process.stdout, { end: false });

 process.stdin.resume();

 process.stdin.pipe(myREPL.stdin, { end: false });

 myREPL.stdin.on('end', function() {
   process.stdout.write('REPL stream ended.');
 });

 myREPL.on('exit', function (code) {
   process.exit(code);
 });

 myREPL.stdout.on('data', function(data) {
    console.log('\n\nSTDOUT: \n');
    console.log('**************************');
    console.log('' + data);
    console.log('==========================');
 });

I created a bundle.js using browserify and my html looks like this.

<!doctype html>
    <html lang="en">
        <head>
            <meta charset="utf-8" />
            <title></title>
            <!--[if IE]>
            <script src="http://html5shiv.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/html5.js"></script>
            <![endif]-->
            <script src="bundle.js"></script>
            <script src="main.js"></script>
        </head>
        <body>

        </body>
    </html>

I am trying to avoid running an http server and piping the results to it in the browser. Is there any other way where I can do it ? Thanks

Original Q&A

There are 3 best solutions below

**alexand7u** · Answer 1

I dont know if this is to late but i managed to run a program from browser starting from this code that works only on linux (i use ubuntu). You will have to run interactive programs with stdbuf -o0 prefix.

var child = require('child_process');
var myREPL = child.spawn('bash');

process.stdin.pipe(myREPL.stdin);

myREPL.stdin.on("end", function() {
    process.exit(0);
});

myREPL.stdout.on('data', function (data) {
    console.log(data+'');
});

myREPL.stderr.on('data', function (data) {
    console.log('stderr: ' + data);
});

An then to make it to work on browser you only need to add socket.io

var myREPL = child.spawn(program);
    myREPL.stdin.on("end", function() {
        socket.emit('consoleProgramEnded');
    });

    myREPL.stdout.on('data', function (data) {
        socket.emit('consoleWrite',data+'');
    });

    myREPL.stderr.on('data', function (data) {
        socket.emit('consoleWrite',data+'');
    });

    socket.on('consoleRead',function(message){
        console.log("Writing to console:"+message);
        myREPL.stdin.write(message.replace("<br>","")+"\n");
    });

I hope that will help you.

**Thorsten Lorenz** · Answer 2

You should look into hyperwatch, which pipes the server side stdout/stderr to the browser and renders it exactly like it would appear in your terminal (including colors).

If it doesn't exactly solve your problem, reading through the code should at least help you. It uses hypernal under the hood in order to convert terminal output to html.

**Alexander Mills** · Answer 3

Alexander Mills On 30 March 2017 at 21:02

I think the frontail NPM module can also do what you want to do -

https://github.com/mthenw/frontail

I have used it and it works

pipe child process stdout & stdin to browser in node.js & browserify

There are 3 best solutions below

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