How to safely Exec any (non bubbletea) programs but maintain rendering

[zachatrocity]

Hey there! First off, I recently found the charm eco system and I'm blown away and can't believe I didnt find this sooner.

As a learning exercise I built a little Groc API based chat based on the https://github.com/charmbracelet/wish/blob/main/examples/multichat/main.go example and that was working well. I then found https://github.com/charmbracelet/mods which is exactly what I want in my daily flow, with the exception of accessing through SSH so I dont have to install mods on all my machines and I can centralize my settings in my home server.

This works fairly well and I have a working example here!

https://git.sr.ht/~zachr/mossh

I wanted this to work in 2 ways:

1. SSH Connection with no passed commands will launch the default mods chat ✅

   • ssh ai.my.domain or ssh localhost -p 23234 results in:
     

2. SSH Connection with prompt passed as command to the wish server:

   • ssh ai.my.domain "my sample prompt" results in:
     

While this works, as you can see from the screenshot all formatting/styling/lipgloss coming from mods isn't applied. I suspect this is because for #1 I'm using a bubbletea middleware and using tea.Exec like the examples found here https://github.com/charmbracelet/wish/blob/main/examples/wish-exec/main.go

However with option 2, in order to automatically pass the commands as args to mods I had to use a custom middleware as you can see here in my sample code:

         func(next ssh.Handler) ssh.Handler {
		return func(sess ssh.Session) {

			// todo: figure out why the renderer wont work through ssh
			// renderer := bubbletea.MakeRenderer(sess)

			if len(sess.Command()) > 0 {
				// commands or args provided pass it to mods
				mods := exec.Command("mods", sess.Command()...)
				mods.Stdout = sess
				mods.Stderr = sess.Stderr()

				mods.Run()

				_ = sess.Exit(1)
			}

			next(sess)
		}
	},

So my question is this, is it possible to maintain the bubbletea formatting from an application installed on the SSH host (mods) when using exec.Command?

I've spent quite some time looking at the examples and source code but I can't quite figure out where I'm going wrong. Any suggestions/tips or am I missing something obvious?

Here is an example of what mods returns with a similar prompt directly and not through my wish server:

Notice the pretty colors.

[caarlos0]

Hey, I believe that if you use wish.Command it should work.

wish.Command will create a PTY and run the command within it.

That said, you can probably remove the that custom handler entirely, you just need to ssh -t (to request a tty) and then the original bubbletea handler will do the trick :)

ssh -t -p 23234 localhost -- hello world

Hope that helps.

---

diff --git a/main.go b/main.go
index ed80a5f..0642607 100644
--- a/main.go
+++ b/main.go
@@ -5,7 +5,6 @@ import (
 	"errors"
 	"net"
 	"os"
-	"os/exec"
 	"os/signal"
 	"syscall"
 	"time"
@@ -48,26 +47,6 @@ func main() {
 				}, []tea.ProgramOption{tea.WithAltScreen()}
 			}),
 			activeterm.Middleware(),
-			func(next ssh.Handler) ssh.Handler {
-				return func(sess ssh.Session) {
-					// todo: figure out why the renderer wont work through ssh
-					// renderer := bubbletea.MakeRenderer(sess)
-
-					if len(sess.Command()) > 0 {
-						// commands or args provided pass it to mods
-						mods := exec.Command("mods", sess.Command()...)
-						mods.Stdout = sess
-						mods.Stderr = sess.Stderr()
-
-						mods.Run()
-
-						_ = sess.Exit(1)
-					}
-
-					next(sess)
-				}
-			},
-
 			logging.Middleware(),
 		),
 	)

[zachatrocity]

omg i knew it was something silly. Thats amazing, thank you!!

Love this toolset, thanks for all you do.