rrr

rrr the Remote Repl Runner. A client and a server, communicating via tcp sockets to help you manage and interact with shells, or other kind of repl.

Or to be more broad, rrr actually permits you to create and communicate with managed a process via pipes.

rrr was made in sort a way it should be simple interact with it using pipes, short commands and from your editors.

e.g to evaluate the type of the selected text in helix(julia template), and replace it with the type name: |rrr <shell> t

Installation

Just build with cargo build, and place the executable in $PATH, don't forget that to use the default launchers, the server should be launched from the project root directory, you could also install with the ./install script, which copies the rrr to /usr/bin, copies launchers to /usr/share/rrr/launchers and creates an rrr-server script in /usr/bin to start the server.

rrr sever

The server is a simple socket server listening at 0.0.0.0:2967 by default, though you can configure the port and address, it manages shell processes and provides an interface to communicate with them.

You need only one server instance running, to start the server, run:

rrr server

You may pass additional information

rrr p=1234 ip=127.0.0.1 l=/usr/share/rrr/launchers server

passcode

Both the server and client take the k= configuration which specifies a passcode the client will send it it's requests for the server to verify with it's own. Just plain comparism, no hashing or something.

rrr client

The rrr client provides an interface to communicate with the server. You can call rrr help to show usage.

Creating a shell template, or launcher

During runtime, rrr looks for launchers in a relative launchers/ directory, the repository contains a few launchers for interacting with fish/python/julia shells. To create a new launcher, you could just inspire yourself of one of them and place an executable file in launchers/.

The fish runner.

#!/usr/bin/env fish
while true
    read -l sentinel
    if test "$sentinel" = kill
        exit 0
    end

    read -l runtype

    # Read lines until the sentinel is found again
    set code_to_run ""
    while read -l line
        if test "$line" = "$sentinel"
            break
        end
        if ! test "$code_to_run" = ""
            set code_to_run (echo "$code_to_run")
        end
        set code_to_run "$code_to_run$line"
    end

    if test "$runtype" = r
        eval "$code_to_run"
    else
        echo "fish laauncher does not implement msg: '$runtype'"
    end

    # Print the sentinel to signal completion
    echo "$sentinel"
end

Creating a new repl from template

rrr +<replname> <templatename>
# e.g
rrr +jl-shell jl
rrr +jl-shell jl ~/projects/julia-project

Sending messages to the repl

rrr <replname> [cmd]
# e.g
echo "c = 5" | rrr jl-shell
echo "c"     | rrr jl-shell t
rrr jl-shell t - "c = 7"

The command receives the code from stdin, and takes an optional second argument default to "r" which is simply an additional hint sent to the launcher, to request for some thing specific, e.g t to get the type of the passed element.

Shutting down a repl

rrr -<replname>
# e.g
rrr -jl-shell

Client options

the client offers you the p and ip options to determine the address of the server, you can also use it to communicate with another machine.

rrr p=1234 ip=192.168.1.191 k=passcode +jl jl

Creating aliasses

The aim of rrr is to be able to use it with quick and short commands with your editor, reason why instead of using a persistent configuration, you can create aliases for your favorite repls and configurations.

alias r='rrr'
alias r1 = 'rrr 1'
alias rra = 'rrr k=password121 ip=192.168.1.1'

Or surely will you prefer to create scripts which you can place in your path in case your editor does not pass through your shell:

#!/usr/bin/env -S /usr/bin/rrr ip=192.168.1.1

Environment variables

You can pass configuration using environment variables too, and that should be prefered than using aliasses for things like passcode, directly passed arguments have precedence over environment variables though. It's actually quite simple, use the parameter's name, preceded by RRR_, e.g:

RRR_IP = 192.168.1.1
RRR_K = My Secret passcode
RRR_P = 12345
RRR_L = /usr/share/rrr/launchers

RRR will simply isolate and lower what's after the RRR_ and pake as though you passed that as configuration.

My config

~/.config/fish/conf.d/rrr.fish

set -gx RRR_K  'Something here..., but what?'

alias r rrr
alias r1 `rrr 1`
alias r2 `rrr 2`
alias r3 `rrr 3`