"remotecontrol" is actually an umbrella command that covers several mechanisms including ReST and XML-RPC. Both PROTOCOLS support access from remote hosts; however, due to security concerns, the current implementations for both in ChimeraX only allow for connections from the local host. To support access across a network, you will need to modify the Python code, taking care of the security trade-off for your environment along the way. Even if you are willing to ignore the security issues for now, you still need to decide on how the different ChimeraX instances find each other. You may well want to stop at this point :-), but nitty gritty details are below if you're comfortable with programming in Python.
The code for supporting ReST and XML-RPC are in "chimerax/rest_server" and "chimerax/remote_control" respectively in the Python "site-packages" directory. Since I wrote rest_server, I can tell you more about that. In rest_server/server.py, there is a line:
self.httpd = HTTPServer(("localhost", port), RESTHandler)
that creates a HTTP server within ChimeraX. As you can see, it only accepts connections on host "localhost" on a particular port. You can change that to, for example, ("", 65000) to allow connections on port 65000 from any host. How you propagate the host and port information among multiple ChimeraX instances is a hard problem for which we have no solution yet. To invoke a command via ReST, you simply send a request to, for example, "http://hostname:65000/run?cmd=open+1gcn", where "open+1gcn" is the HTTP GET encoded string for the ChimeraX command "open 1gcn"; the output from the command is the returned text from the HTTP request.
You can see how the rest_server code currently works by running the ChimeraX command:
remote rest start
You should see some output like:
REST server started on host 127.0.0.1 port XXXX
in the Log panel. You can then go to a web browser and visit:
http://localhost:XXXX/cmdline.html
to display a ChimeraX command line in the browser window, where you can issue commands and see the output.
Hope this helps.
Conrad
On 7/24/2017 11:48 AM, Simon Smith wrote:
I'm trying to find a way to mirror ChimeraX commands from one machine onto several others running on a network. Could someone tell me if the 'remotecontrol' command would be a good way to do this, and if so, how I could get started using it? As far as I can tell there's no documentation available for it yet.
Thanks, Simon
ChimeraX-users mailing list ChimeraX-users@cgl.ucsf.edu Manage subscription: http://www.rbvi.ucsf.edu/mailman/listinfo/chimerax-users