A session manager and transparent proxy for gtk/broadway applications

To install dependencies for CentOS 7.7: yum install perl-Gtk3 perl-XML-Simple perl-DBD-SQLite perl-HTTP-Server-Simple perl-File-Slurp

Some dependencies are not available via yum:

unsetenv LD_LIBRARY_PATH && perl -MCPAN -e 'install Gtk3::Ex::DBI::Form' && perl -MCPAN -e 'install Data::GUID'

Before running, you need to launch the management GUI, which will create a configuration database. The management GUI is a perl/gtk application. Run it:

perl config.pl

Add some applications you want to expose to web users. To start with, try adding 'gedit'.

Add a user and provide a password. The password will be hashed before inserting into the DB.

Finally, enable some apps for users, by selecting an app, a user, and clicking the 'add' button int the bottom-right corner.

There is a wrapper script to launch all the required services:

./launch_services.sh

There are 3 services that are launched on startup, and one dynamically launched:

This service is the front-end that your web browser will hit. At its heart is a TCP proxy based on an asynchronous event loop, by Peteris Krumins ([email protected]). Incoming requests are inspected to locate our authentication cookie. The client is proxied to various endpoints based on this cookie.

• If no cookie exists, the client is served the authentication page

• If a cookie exists, but no application has been selected, the client is served a page that lists applications available to them

• If a cookie exists and an application has been selected, the client is proxied to the broadway port that their application instance is running on

This service implements a login page. Successful logins generate an authentication cookie, which contains a UUID. The UUID is stamped in their record in our SQLite config database, along with a port ( which will be the port that the user_app_service is running on ). Finally, a client refresh is triggered, which will send the client back to the broadway proxy. The proxy should see the auth cookie, and proxy the user_app_service for them.

This service lists available apps for a logged-in user. This could use some visual 'improvements' :) When a user makes a selection, it gets checked against the config DB ( to make sure they haven't injected something they're not allowed to run ). If everything checks out, a free port is located ( to run broadway on ) and an instance of sessionmanager.pl is forked, and passed detail of the application to launch and manage ( including the port to run broadway on ). Finally, the user's record in the config DB is updated with the broadway port, and another client refresh is triggered.

This service launches both the application instance and broadwayd instance for a logged-in user. It then waits for either process to exit, and when one does, cleans up by killing the other to reclaim the port.

Apart from cleaning up the user_app_service.pl service, we could use some https termination for enterprise security. This could be done with an nginx proxy placed in front of broadway_proxy.pl. If you're going to have clients connect from an insecure network, then this is highly advised. Without https, your username/password/cookie will be sent in plain text. For my use cases, what we have is already good enough. Please feel free to contribute and https solution :)