remote execute program

[Cecil Ward]

On Friday, 23 March 2018 at 01:23:56 UTC, Cecil Ward wrote:
> I am wanting to write a short program (on a ‘server’ you could 
> say) that takes a command, runs it (as on the command line, so 
> an executable with arguments or a shell command) and returns a 
> 3-tuple with an int for the return code, plus the textual 
> outputs that it generates to stdout and stderr. I can see a 
> number of suitable routines in the D runtime libraries, which 
> are already D-ified to save me a some trouble mindlessly 
> converting code from C.
>
> Where I could do with some help is as follows: I'm needing to 
> send the commands to a remote box using http has to be used 
> because the local-end program (on an iPad) that I have to 
> interfacing to can only speak http/https, and can not handle 
> just a straight eg TCP connection. Despite the overheads from 
> using http, if I can employ gzip compression on the link then 
> that will be a big gain.
>
> Could anyone give me some general pointers for where to look?
>
> The server box is a linux machine. I'm a very experienced 
> professional C programmer but amazingly have never done 
> anything with *nix in general or http-related C libraries.
>
>
> I asked a question in this forum earlier about general 
> low-level networking, but now this requirement has come up that 
> mandates the use of very simple http and needs only synchronous 
> operations. The impressive framework that is vibe.d has already 
> been mentioned, but the amount of reading matter is rather 
> daunting.
>
> A simple D example of an http transaction would be very helpful.

It's not really a D question, in a sense, it's just that I am out 
of my depth. And wrapping fat C libraries, particularly 
converting .h files is something that I don't have any experience 
of, so something ready-cooked in D would b good.

What library routines are available - or do I have to start 
wading through the vastness of vibe.d?