The c2w utility converts a CLI program to a Web service.

% pip install c2w

We convert kramdown to a web service to get an online Markdown renderer.

% c2w --mime text/html kramdown

c2w is serving on 127.0.0.1:8000 now.

% curl http://localhost:8000 -X POST --data-binary @- << __EOF__
heredoc> # TITLE
heredoc>
heredoc> This is **strong**.
heredoc> __EOF__

We could get the following.

<h1 id="title">TITLE</h1>

<p>This is <strong>strong</strong>.</p>

c2w handles both GET and POST requests and treats them as the same with the following rules.

• The query string will be split by &, decoded and sent to kramdown as arguments.

• The request body will be sent to the stdin of kramdown and the stdout of kramdown will be sent to the browser.

kramdown can translate Mardown to LaTex with the option -o latex. If we want to get the LaTex output, we could put -o&latex in the query string.

% curl 'http://localhost:8000?-o&latex' --data-binary @- << __EOF__
heredoc> # TITLE
heredoc>
heredoc> This is **strong**.
heredoc> __EOF__

We got the following.

\section{TITLE}\hypertarget{title}{}\label{title}

This is \textbf{strong}.

The HTTP server provided by c2w is not mature enough and not recommended to use in a production environment. You may want to use Apache HTTPd or Nginx. To achieve this you can run c2w in CGI mode.

Create a simple Shell script named netmark.

#!/bin/bash

c2w --cgi --mime text/html kramdown

Give it the execution permission and put it in the cgi-bin directory of your HTTP server.

Run c2w --help.

c2w: Convert Any CLI Program to a Web Service