trusted-cgi

README

Trusted-CGI

Lightweight self-hosted lambda/applications/cgi/serverless-functions engine.

Why?

Because I want to write small handlers that will be 99% of time just do nothing. I am already paying for the cheapest Digital Ocean (thanks guys for your existence) and do not want to pay additionally to Lambda providers like Google/Amazon/Azure.

I also tried self hosted solutions based on k3s but it too heavy for 1GB server (yep, it is, don't believe in marketing).

So, 'cause I am a Developer I decided to make my own wheels ;-)

Idea behind

Idea came from past: CGI. In a beginning of Internet, people have being making a simple scripts that receives incoming bytes over STDIN (standard input) and writes to STDOUT (standard output). The application server (aka CGI server), accepts clients, invokes scripts and redirects socket input/output to the script. There are a lot of details here but this is brief explanation.

After more than 20 years the world spin around and arrived to the beginning: serverless functions/lambda and so on. It is almost CGI, except scripts became a docker containers, and we need much more servers to do the same things as before.

So let's cut the corners a bit: we have a trusted developer (our self, company workers - means it's not arbitrary clients), so we don't need a heavy restriction for the application, so let's throw away docker and another heavy staff.

Add some piece of security: inbound IP, inbound origins, tokens....

Add monitoring of hits and history details....

Add neat Web UI file browsing with edit functions...

Add playground where you can test your scripts....

Add nice logo, license everything under MIT and you will get Trusted-CGI.

Installation

Direct to server

Recommended: ubuntu LTS x64 server

Please see in bintray or in releases page

Docker

• Pull image: docker pull reddec/trusted-cgi
• Run for test docker run --rm -p 3434:3434 reddec/trusted-cgi

There are several exposed parameters (see Dockerfile), however, data stored in /data and initial admin password is admin (change it!).

The docker image contains pre-installed python3 (+requests), node js (+axios) and php to let experiment with default functions.

TODO

• Service file for Ubuntu + user generation for chroot
• Upload/download tarball
• CLI control