telnetify is a tool for local development of TELNET applications.

It has two important limitations:

• only runs in Unix-like environments
• requires a telnet client to be installed

Synopsis

telnetify COMMAND [COMMAND ARGUMENTS]

Status

Installation

This project uses Cargo for package management.

http://doc.crates.io/

From a clean checkout, you should be able to build and install telnetify with a single command.

~$ cargo install

Exposition

To understand telnetify, it's important to know that TELNET is a negotiation protocol.

https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc854

This may not be particularly obvious since more modern use of telnet (for example, testing an HTTP or SMTP server) does not actually use the TELNET protocol!

With that in mind, there are really two ways to go about developing a TELNET server.

• You could write a long-running daemon that handles client connections and uses either processes, threads or a select loop to service each connection.

• You could write an application that speaks TELNET over STDIN and STDOUT to a single client, and let a super-server (like inetd) spawn the application for incoming client connections.

One of the potential downsides of the latter approach is needing an easy way to hook your application up to a TELNET client for development purposes.

Fortunately, that's exactly what telnetify addreses.

Demonstration

Let's demonstrate with Nyancat!

http://nyancat.dakko.us/

~$ git clone https://github.com/klange/nyancat.git
~$ cd nyancat
~/nyancat$ make
~/nyancat$ telnetify src/nyancat -t