Embedding a remote Python shell in an application

Question

You can embed the IPython shell inside of your application so that it launches the shell in the foreground. Is there a way to embed a telnet server in a python app so that you can telnet to a certain port and launch a remote IPython shell?

Any tips for redirecting the input/output streams for IPython or how to hook it up to a telnet server library or recommendations for other libraries that could be used to implement this are much appreciated.

Answer 1

Python includes a telnet client, but not a telnet server. You can implement a telnet server using Twisted. Here's an example. As for hooking these things together, that's up to you.

Answer 2

I think you should base your server class on the SocketServer class from the standard library. You'll need to write a RequestHandler to read and echo input but a lot of the heavy lifting is already done for you.

You can use the ThreadingMixIn to make the server multi-threaded very easily.

Answer 3

Use Twisted Manhole. Docs are a bit lacking, but it's easy enough to set up a telnet-based remote server and it comes with a GTK-based GUI.

• Main Twisted site
• twisted.manhole API docs

Answer 4

Try to use xmlrpc namespace