What I learned while writing web Samba client

I recently started working on project for a web based client of samba share. I want to use it for Chromecast streaming of

Rails ActionController::Live

You can stream content with http using ActionController::Live this is very interesting piece of tech that allows You to deliver content as You generate it. It is especially useful when content might be long.

class MessagesController < ApplicationController
  include ActionController::Live

  def index
    @messages = Message.all
  end

  def create
    @message = Message.create!(params[:message].permit(:content, :name))
  end

  def events
    3.times do |n|
      response.stream.write "#{n}...\n\n"
      sleep 2
    end
  ensure
    response.stream.close
  end
end

/dev/fd/1 is used as file/io pipe

This is very good example of using /dev/fd. /dev/fd/1 is specially crafted file that corresponds to STDOUT of process that is accesing it. smbclient -E -U $USERNAME //server/sharename $PASSWORD -c 'get \\dir\\filename.gz /dev/fd/1' 2>/dev/null | zcat | yourcommand

curl can be used to download files from Samba shares (only v1)

curl supports the smb protocol since v7.40 (https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTg4MzI):

• curl --upload-file /path/to/file.ext -u 'DOMAIN\Username' smb://172.16.17.52/ShareName/
• curl --upload-file /home/me/moderately_sized_file --user "OurWindowsDomain/MyUserName:MyPassword" smb://172.16.17.52/OurRemoteDirectory/Path/To/Dir/

Sources:

• https://piotrmurach.com/articles/streaming-large-zip-files-in-rails/
• http://railscasts.com/episodes/401-actioncontroller-live?view=asciicast
• https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/190391/using-smb-to-pipe-contents-of-file-to-local-command-on-local-machine
• https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/206415/sending-files-over-samba-with-command-line

That's it for this post, thanks for reading!