shell-test

shell-test

Minimal browser-based terminal for Slicer VMs, using the SDK's shell.ProxyHandler and xterm.js. No auth, no users — for integration testing only.

Prerequisites

• A running Slicer daemon with at least one host group configured.
• Go 1.22+

Quick start

1. Generate a Slicer config and start the daemon

mkdir -p /tmp/shell-test && cd /tmp/shell-test

slicer new mygroup \
  --count=0 \
  --net=isolated \
  --api-bind=./shell-test.sock \
  --graceful-shutdown=false \
  > slicer.yaml

sudo -E slicer up ./slicer.yaml > ./slicer.log 2>&1 &
echo $! | sudo tee /tmp/shell-test/slicer.pid

Wait a few seconds for the daemon to start, then verify:

tail -5 /tmp/shell-test/slicer.log
# Should show "API listening on Unix socket: ./shell-test.sock"

2. Start the shell-test UI

cd /path/to/sdk
go run ./examples/shell-test/ --url /tmp/shell-test/shell-test.sock

Open http://<host>:3333 in a browser.

If no VMs are running, click Launch VM in the UI. Otherwise, select a VM from the dropdown and click Connect.

3. Clean up

sudo kill -INT $(cat /tmp/shell-test/slicer.pid)
sleep 3
sudo kill -9 $(cat /tmp/shell-test/slicer.pid) 2>/dev/null || true

Flags

How it works

The Go server provides three API endpoints:

• GET /api/vms — lists running VMs via client.ListVMs()
• GET /api/hostgroups — lists host groups via client.GetHostGroups()
• POST /api/launch?group=NAME — creates a new VM via client.CreateVMWithOptions(), waits for agent readiness

The shell WebSocket is proxied at /ws/shell?vm=HOSTNAME using shell.NewProxyHandler() with a VMNameFunc that reads the hostname from the query string.

The frontend uses CDN-hosted xterm.js and the Slicer binary frame protocol (5-byte header: 1 byte type + 4 bytes big-endian length).