Run programs in a Pod

Create a terminal and run programs inside a Pod

This guide will show you how to add interactive terminals on your page.

This guide assumes you have a Pod running already. Take a look at our Quickstart and npm project setup guide to learn more.

Create a terminal

1. Add an HTML element on your page

A terminal needs an element in your page to render into. Add the following element to the HTML of the relevant page:

<div id="console"></div>

2. Starting the terminal

Then add the following line of JavaScript:

const terminal = await pod.createDefaultTerminal(
  document.getElementById("console")
);

(If using one of the templates, you would add this to src/main.js)

If you’d like to customize such as changing the size or invoking a specific callback, you can call createCustomTerminal instead.

That’s it! You now have a terminal on your page. On its own it’s just a display; the next section covers how to run programs in it.

Using the terminal

There are two ways to use it: run an interactive shell, or run programs directly.

Run an interactive shell

Running bash with no arguments gives you an interactive shell in the terminal, which is useful while developing:

await pod.run("bash", [], { terminal });

Run a program

If you prefer to run programs/terminal commands without manually inputting them, you can use pod.run.

You pass pod.run the program, its arguments, and an options object that contains:

terminal: Which terminal the program runs in.
cwd: the working directory to run in
echo: prints the command itself to the terminal before running it

For example, if you’d want to run Node:

await pod.run("node", ["main.js"], {
  echo: true,
  terminal,
  cwd: "/project",
});

Pods come with programs like node, git, and bash already installed, but you can also run your own. Once you’ve copied a binary into the Pod, run it by path like anything else:

await pod.run("/project/hello", [], { terminal, cwd: "/project" });

The binary has to be compiled for BrowserPod’s platform, a program built for your own machine won’t run in a Pod. See Installing the Rust toolchain for an example of producing one.