clipserva

README

ClipServa

Instantly serve your system clipboard content over HTTP!

Smartly serves as JSON if your clipboard holds valid JSON, otherwise serves plain text.

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ClipServa is a lightweight, cross-platform command-line tool that starts a local HTTP server to expose the current content of your system clipboard. It's perfect for quick data transfers, local development testing, frontend teams, or any scenario where you need to programmatically access your clipboard's content via HTTP.

✨ Features

• Dynamic Content Type: Automatically serves content as application/json if it's valid JSON, or text/plain otherwise.
• Real-time: Fetches the latest clipboard content on every API request.
• Fast: Starts instantly, parses and serves your clipboard in ~2 miliseconds.
• Configurable: Set host, port, and API endpoint path via command-line flags.
• CORS Compatible: Includes Access-Control-Allow-Origin: * header for easy integration with web-based frontends and local development.
• Lightweight & Simple: Single Go binary with minimal dependencies.
• Cross-Platform: Works on Windows, macOS, and Linux (wherever Go and clipboard access are supported).

🤔 Why ClipServa?

• Rapid Prototyping: Quickly feed data from your clipboard to a local web app or script.
• Testing API Clients: Use your clipboard to provide mock JSON responses for HTTP clients you're developing.
• Simple Data Transfer: Easily get text or JSON from your desktop to a VM or another device on your local network.
• Debugging: Inspect complex JSON data copied from other applications by viewing it formatted in your browser or tools like jq.

🚀 Installation

1. Ensure you have Go installed and your Go environment (e.g., GOPATH, GOBIN) is set up.
2. Install ClipServa:

   go install github.com/SleepyStew/clipserva@latest
   

3. This will build the clipserva binary and place it in your $GOPATH/bin or $GOBIN directory. Make sure this directory is in your system's PATH.

Alternatively, clone the repository and build manually:

git clone https://github.com/SleepyStew/clipserva.git
cd clipserva
go build -o clipserva .

Then you can run ./clipserva or move it to a directory in your PATH.

🗃️ Download (Alternative)

Latest build for Windows

🛠️ Usage

Run ClipServa from your terminal:

clipserva [flags]

Upon starting, ClipServa will log the address and API endpoint it's listening on.

   _____ _ _       _____
  / ____| (_)     / ____|
 | |    | |_ _ __| (___   ___ _ ____   ____ _
 | |    | | | '_ \\___ \ / _ \ '__\ \ / / _` |
 | |____| | | |_) |___) |  __/ |   \ V / (_| |
  \_____|_|_| .__/_____/ \___|_|    \_/ \__,_|
            | | By SleepyStew
            |_|

Starting ClipServa on http://localhost:6901/api
Copy some text (including JSON) to your clipboard!
Run with --help to see available options.

Command-Line Flags

ClipServa provides the following command-line flags to customize its behavior:

Flag	Description	Default
--host	Host address to serve on	localhost
--port	Port to serve on	6901
--api-path	API endpoint path for serving clipboard content	/api
--help	Show help message

Example: To run ClipServa on all network interfaces, on port 8080, with the API endpoint at /clipboard:

clipserva --host 0.0.0.0 -port 8080 --api-path /clipboard

The server would then be accessible at http://<your-ip>:8080/clipboard.

Accessing Clipboard Content

Once ClipServa is running:

1. Copy Content: Copy any text or valid JSON data to your system clipboard.
2. Make a GET Request:
   • Using a browser: Navigate to http://<host>:<port><api-path> (e.g., http://localhost:6901/api).
     • If the content is JSON, your browser might display it formatted or offer to download it.
     • If it's plain text, it will be displayed as such.
   • Using curl:

     curl http://localhost:6901/api
     

     To pretty-print JSON output with jq:

     curl -s http://localhost:6901/api | jq
     

   • From your application: Make an HTTP GET request to the configured endpoint.

The root path (http://localhost:6901/ by default) displays a simple status message:

ClipServa is running! Send a GET request to /api to get current clipboard content (JSON or plain text).

⚙️ How It Works

ClipServa uses the github.com/atotto/clipboard library to read from the system clipboard. When a GET request is received at the configured API endpoint:

1. It reads the current content from the clipboard.
2. It attempts to parse the content as JSON.
   • If successful, it sets the Content-Type header to application/json and returns the JSON data.
   • If parsing fails, it assumes the content is plain text, sets Content-Type to text/plain; charset=utf-8, and returns the text.
3. The Access-Control-Allow-Origin: * header is always set to allow cross-origin requests.

An initial check for clipboard accessibility is performed on startup, but the server will attempt to run even if this initial check fails (as clipboard content might become available later).

📄 License

Distributed under the MIT License. See LICENSE file for more information.

🙏 Acknowledgements

• Relies on the excellent github.com/atotto/clipboard library.

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Made by SleepyStew.