joewalnes/websocketd

Health v2 · maintenance only

Adoption not part of the score

17466 stars · 1008 forks observed · 2026-08-28

What it is AI-extracted, prompt v1, taxonomy v1, 2026-08-29, confidence not recorded

websocketd is a small command-line tool written in Go that wraps any executable program reading STDIN and writing STDOUT, exposing it as a WebSocket server. It works like inetd or CGI for WebSockets, forking a dedicated process per connection and piping messages between the client and the program.

Use cases

• turn a bash script into a websocket server
• expose a command-line program over websockets
• build realtime browser apps without websocket libraries
• pipe stdin/stdout to a web browser
• prototype websocket endpoints in any language
• stream live output from a script to a web page

When to choose

• you want websocket endpoints in any language with no networking libraries
• you prefer the UNIX philosophy of small text-stream programs
• you need quick prototypes or simple realtime push from scripts
• you want per-connection process isolation

When to avoid

• you need high-performance, in-process websocket handling at large scale
• you need rich websocket features like binary frames, subprotocols, or fine-grained control
• you need TLS termination, clustering, or advanced routing built in
• your messages are not newline-delimited text

Facets

cli-tool · maturity stable

websocket http-server cli web-development backend developer-tools windows cross-platform cli websocket-server stdin-stdout language-agnostic unix-philosophy inetd-like real-time linux macos

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markdown · JSON · MCP: product_card(name="joewalnes/websocketd")