ExTTY

Run an Elixir or Erlang shell as a GenServer process

Installation

Install extty by adding it to your list of dependencies in mix.exs:

def deps() do
  [
    {:extty, "~> 0.2"}
  ]
end

Usage

This is heavily adapted from ssh_cli.erl and functions much like the SSH console implementation.

This will start a terminal shell process in a GenServer. You can then send ANSI text to it to behave like a normal TTY. When starting the shell, you must specify a handler pid to receive the returned text data. The incoming message will be formatted as {:tty_data, String.t()}

iex()> {:ok, tty} = ExTTY.start_link(handler: self())
iex()> flush()
{:tty_data, "Interactive Elixir (1.10.3) - press Ctrl+C to exit (type h() ENTER for help)\r\n"}
{:tty_data, "iex(1)> "}
iex()> ExTTY.send_text(tty, "1+1\n")
:ok
iex()> flush()
{:tty_data, "1+1\r\n"}
{:tty_data, "\e[33m2\e[0m\r\n"}
{:tty_data, "iex(2)> "}

When running in a cluster, a shell process can also be started on a remote node by passing the node name to the remsh option:

iex(foo)1> Node.connect(:bar)
true
iex(foo)2> Node.list()
[:bar]
iex(foo)3> {:ok, tty} = ExTTY.start_link(handler: self(), remsh: :bar)
iex(foo)4> flush()
{:tty_data,
 "Interactive Elixir (1.17.0-dev) - press Ctrl+C to exit (type h() ENTER for help)\r\n"}
{:tty_data, "iex(bar)1> "}