Question

A couple of months ago I created a form in html/php that would be use to enter informations about new Virtual Machine.

I’ve also been working on a simple ruby script that would find a new IP address for a new Virtual Machine.

Those two projects were not linked, but now I would like it to be.. but I’m having a hard time. What I’d like to do is to run the ruby script with the informations provided in by the user in the web form.

Lets say the user enters the new VM name (vm1) and some other things like its vlan id (1). I’d like to be able to have the form launch the script with the right paramaters (./script.rb –add vm1 –vlanid 1 –…). I tried to find an easy way to do this, but did not manage to. I installed passenger, but I’m kind of lost with it and it seems pretty overkill to install that only to do what I want.

Thank you guys!

Answer 1

You could do it with exec():

<?php
// TODO: Security checks!
exec("./script.rb --arg1 $arg1 --arg2 $arg2 &");
?>

Another way to do it is add a web interface to your Ruby script. A great gem for very simple web interfaces is Sinatra, you can just define a basic handler:

require 'rubygems'
require 'sinatra'

get "/" do
  # do what you need to do, all the GET arguments are in the params Hash
end