OliveTin

OliveTin is a web interface for running Linux shell commands.

Some example use cases;

1. Give controlled access to run shell commands to less technical folks who cannot be trusted with SSH. I use this so my family can podman restart plex without asking me, and without giving them shell access!
2. Great for home automation tablets stuck on walls around your house - I use this to turn Hue lights on and off for example.
3. Sometimes SSH access isn't possible to a server, or you are feeling too lazy to type a long command you run regularly! I use this to send Wake on Lan commands to servers around my house.

YouTube video demo (6 mins)

Features

• Responsive, touch-friendly UI - great for tablets and mobile
• Super simple config in YAML - because if it's not YAML now-a-days, it's not "cloud native" :-)
• Dark mode - for those of you that roll that way.
• Accessible - passes all the accessibility checks in Firefox, and issues with accessibility are taken seriously.
• Container - available for quickly testing and getting it up and running, great for the selfhosted community.
• Integrate with anything - OliveTin just runs Linux shell commands, so theoretially you could integrate with a bunch of stuff just by using curl, ping, etc. However, writing your own shell scripts is a great way to extend OliveTin.
• Lightweight on resources - uses only a few MB of RAM and barely any CPU. Written in Go, with a web interface written as a modern, responsive, Single Page App that uses the REST/gRPC API.
• Good amount of unit tests and style checks - helps potential contributors be consistent, and helps with maintainability.

Screenshots

Desktop web browser;

Desktop web browser (dark mode);

Mobile screen size (responsive layout);

Example config.yaml

Put this config.yaml in /etc/OliveTin/ if you're running a standard service, or mount it at /config if running in a container.

listenAddressWebUI: 0.0.0.0:1337 # Listen on all addresses available, port 1337
logLevel: "INFO"
actions: 
- title: Restart Plex
  icon: smile
  shell: docker restart plex
  
  # This will send 1 ping 
- title: Ping Google.com
  shell: ping google.com -c 1
  
  # Restart lightdm on host "overseer"
- title: restart lightdm
  icon: poop
  shell: ssh root@overseer 'service lightdm restart'

A full example config can be found at in this repository - config.yaml.

Ports

By default OliveTin will use the following ports;

• 1337 - for hosting the web interface
• 1338 - for the REST API (the api the web interface uses to do stuff)
• 1339 - a modern gRPC API (OliveTin uses protobuf under the hood)

Some people might not want the gRPC API public - simply set listenAddressGrpcActions: 127.0.0.1:1339 in your config so it doesn't listen publicly. It cannot be disabled completely - it's required for the REST API to work.

Installation - systemd service (recommended)

Running OliveTin as a systemd service on a Linux machine is a bit more effort than running as a container - but it means it can use any program installed on your machine (you don't have to add programs to a container).

1. Copy the OliveTin binary to /usr/sbin/OliveTin
2. Copy the webui directory contents to /var/www/olivetin/ (eg, /var/www/olivetin/index.html)
3. Copy the OliveTin.service file to /etc/systemd/system/
4. Create a config.yaml using the example provided above to get you started.

Run systemctl restart OliveTin and check systemctl status OliveTin.

Installation - as a container

Of course, running a container image is very straightforward - but you might need to add files and programs to the OliveTin container to make it useful for your use case. Generally running a systemd service is better for OliveTin.

Running - podman (or docker)

There is a container image that is periodically updated here; https://hub.docker.com/repository/docker/jamesread/olivetin

root@host: podman create --name olivetin -p 1337 -p 1338 -p 1339 -v /etc/olivetin/:/config:ro docker.io/jamesread/olivetin

Building - buildah (or docker build)

root@host: buildah bud -t olivetin