Running command with browser_问答_开发者_运维开发者技术经验分享

I want to have a "control panel" on a website, and when a button is pressed, I want it to run a command on the server (my computer). The panel is to run different python scripts I wrote (one script for each button), and I want to 开发者_开发百科run the panel on my Mac, my iPod touch, and my wii. The best way I see for this is a website, since they all have browsers. Is there a javascript or something to run a command on my computer whenever the button is pressed?

EDIT: I heard AJAX might work for server-based things like this, but I have no idea how to do that. Is there like a 'system' block or something I can use?

Here are three options:

Have each button submit a form with the name of the script in a hidden field. The server will receive the form parameters and can then branch off to run the appropriate script.
Have each button hooked to it's own unique URL and use javascript on the button click to just set window.location to that new URL. Your server will receive that URL and can decide which script to run based on the URL. You could even just use a link on the web page with no javascript.
Use Ajax to issue a unique URL to your server. This is essentially the same (from the server's point of view) as the previous two options. The main difference is that the web browser doesn't change what URL it's pointing to. The ajax call just directs the server to do something and return some data which the host web page can then do whatever it wants with.

On the client side (the browser), you can do it with the simplest approach. Just an html form. javascript would make it nicer for validation and to do ajax calls so the page doesnt have to refresh. But your main focus is handling it on the server. You could receive the form request in the language of your choice. If you are already running python, you could write a super fast cgi python script. Look at the cgi module for python. You would need to put this into the apache server on osx if thats where you will host it. Unfortunately, your question about exactly how to write it is beyond the scope of a simple answer. But google for how to write and html form, or look at maybe jquery to build a quick form that can make ajax calls easily. Then search for how to use the python cgi module and receive POST requests.

Javascript is basically for doing work in the browser (usually to render something nice for the end user to look at). What you want (as others have said already) is a way to connect an HTML form action to an action on the webserver "back end". And this is exactly (as RobG has pointed out) what CGI is for. An alternative to CGI which is quite popular with Apache users is mod_python - the difference is basically whether the "back end" operation runs as a standalone process (CGI) or inside a webserver process (mod_python), but for most basic applications your server side scripts don't need to care. And if you're in a shared hosting environment you may not have a choice - ask your sysadmin (or read your hosting service docs) to learn how best to run CGI scripts in this case.

Caveats:

You will probably need fairly elevated webserver admin access & expertise in order to get everything set up the way you want. You will at least need to be able (both in the sense of permissions and technical understanding) to view your webserver logs, edit your webserver configs and bounce (restart) your http service.
Whatever "back end" operations you want done will be done with the permissions/privileges of the webserver, which may not be the same as the permissions/privileges of the user account which you normally use to perform these operations. There are various ways around this (using custom daemons and/or sudo operations), but you really need to have a clear understanding with the webserver sysadmin (if the webserver is exposed to the Big Bad Internet) about how this is going to work before you deploy anything, otherwise you run the very real risk (especially if you are a noob) of making it possible for hackers to exploit your "command gateway" to hack the webserver.

Of course if you're just doing all this for fun on your personal laptop (there is an OSX tag on the question, after all), then you are the webserver sysadmin, and you're free to hack away and happily shoot yourself in the foot repeatedly while learning everything you need to know along the way, which is fine as long as you're not on a network. In this case, you may find this tutorial to be useful.