In category: ← Software Development / FaaS & Serverless

About Trusted-CGI

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

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More about Trusted-CGI

Trusted-CGI

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

see docs

Features:

No specific requirements: just one binary. Working "as-is"
One-click new lambda with public link and handler. Available immediately.
Rich API
Security: user switch, IP restrictions, Origin restrictions, tokens ....
Time limits
Permanent links (aliases)
Actions - independent instruction that could be run via UI/API on server
Scheduler: run actions in cron-tab like style
Queues and retries
... etc - see docs

P.S

There is minimal version of trusted-cgi: nano-run. Check it out - it DevOps friendly with configuration-first approach (ie easier to use for infrastructure-as-a-code).

Installation

Since 0.3.3 Linux, Darwin and even Windows OS supported: pre-built binaries could be found in releases

TL;DR;

for production for debian servers - use ~~bintray repository~~ github release (recommend)
locally or non-debian server - download binary and run
for quick tests or for limited production - use docker image (docker run --rm -p 3434:3434 reddec/trusted-cgi)

See installation manual

Overview

The process flow is quite straightforward: one light daemon in background listens for requests and launches scripts/apps on demand. An executable shall read standard input (stdin) for request data and write a response to standard output (stdout).

Technically any script/application that can parse STDIN and write something to STDOUT should be capable of the execution.

Trusted-cgi designed keeping in mind that input and output data is quite small and contains structured data (json/xml), however, there are no restrictions on the platform itself.

Key differences with classic CGI:

Only request body is being piped to scripts input (CGI pipes everything, and application has to parse it by itself - it could be very not trivial and slow (it depends))
Request headers, form fields, and query params are pre-parsed by the platform and can be passed as an environment variable (see mapping)
Response headers are pre-defined in manifest

Due to changes, it's possible to make the simplest script with JSON input and output like this:

import sys
import json

request = json.load(sys.stdin) # read and parse request
response = ['hello', 'world']  # do some logic and make response
json.dump(response, sys.stdout)  # send it to client

Keep in mind, the platform also adds a growing number of new features - see features.

target audience

It's best (but not limited) for

for hobby projects
for experiments
for projects with a low number of requests: webhooks, scheduled processing, etc..
for a project working on low-end machines: raspberry pi, cheapest VPS, etc..

However, if your projects have overgrown the platform limitations, it should be quite easy to migrate to any other solutions, because most low-level details are hidden and could be replaced in a few days (basically - just wrap script to HTTP service)

Also, it is possible to scale the platform performance by just launching the same instances of the platform with a shared file system (or docker images) with a balancer in front of it.