WRP - Web Rendering Proxy

AmiFox Server Version

A browser-in-browser "proxy" server that allows to use historical / vintage web browsers on the modern web. It works by rendering a web page in to a GIF, JPG, PNG or even ILBM IFF image with clickable imagemap.

This server can be used as the original WRP in a webbrowser but works much better using the dedicated AmiFox app available for m68k Amiga

Differences to the official WRP

The AmiFox server is a slightly adapted Version of the official WRP. Changes are made to work better with a native amiga program. e.g.

• Added a forward history button
• Keys for page up/page down added
• IFF-ILBM Format, picture format added, it's not viewable in Browsers but work very nicely on Amiga
• Click and Drag, it is possible to click on a position and drag the mouse before release and that is send in that way to the server, very useful for scrollbars or map applications. Not possible in a simple Browser though (would need working javascript) but in a native Amiga program of course possible
• Copy selected text, the click and drag feature allows it to select text, that text can be copied to the client
• Get clipboard, also when the page copies something to clipboard, it can be transfered to clipboard
• Downloads, announce downloadable content to the client (with an exception list of mime types)
• SSL added, it is possible to use SSL encrypted traffic to the server
• Token, protect the running server by a token which must be send with every request to the server (makes the server unusable in browsers, but more secure in Apps / via API)
• removed logging of keystrokes to the log file
• Added a AmiFox-Server version to footer

All changes are made in a way to keep the original functionality intact, therefore the server is meant as Server for AmiFox component but still usable like a regular WRP.

Usage Instructions

• Start the WRP executable or docker container
• Add a ToolType to AmiFox WRPSERVER=name_or_ip_of_WRP:Port_of_WRP
• Add a ToolType WRPTOKEN=token if you also added a token as security, see Flag -token

Docker

$ docker run -d -p 80:8080 alb42/amifoxserver

Flags

-l     listen address:port (default :8080)
-sl    TLS listen address:port (default :8081)
-t     image type iff, gif, png or jpg (default gif)
-O     Optimize PNG images with external tool (optipng)
-g     image geometry, WxHxC, height can be 0 for unlimited (default 1152x600x216)
       C (number of colors) is only used for GIF
-q     Jpeg image quality, default 80%
-h     headless mode, hide browser window on the server (default true)
-d     chromedp debug logging (default false)
-n     do not free maps and images after use (default false)
-ui    html template file (default "wrp.html")
-ua  user agent, override the default "headless" agent
-s     delay/sleep after page is rendered before screenshot is taken (default 2s)
-token If set, all requests need to have this set as Bearer header
-log If set, logging will be redirected to given file

Minimal Requirements

• Server/Gateway requires modern hardware and operating system that is supported by Go language and Chrome/Chromium Browser, which must be installed.
• Client Browser needs to support HTML FORMs and ISMAP. Typically Mosaic 2.0 would be minimum version for forms. However ISMAP was supported since 0.6B, so if you manually enter url using ?url=..., you can use the earlier version.

Troubleshooting

I can't get it to run

This program does not have a GUI and is run from the command line. After downloading, you may need to enable executable bit on Unix systems, for example:

$ cd ~/Downloads
$ chmod +x wrp-amd64-macos
$ ./wrp-amd64-macos

Websites are blocking headless browsers

This is a well known issue. WRP has some provisions to work around it, but it's a cat and mouse game. The first and foremost recommendation is to change User Agent, so that it doesn't say "headless". Add -ua="my agent" to override the default one. Obtain your regular desktop browser user agent and specify it as the flag. For example

$ wrp -ua="Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_7) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/119.0.0.0 Safari/537.36"

History

• Version 1.0 (2014) started as a cgi-bin script, adaptation of webkit2png.py and pcidade.py, blog post.
• Version 2.0 became a stand alone http-proxy server, supporting both Linux and MacOS, another post.
• In 2016 thanks to EFF/Certbot the whole internet migrated to HTTPS/SSL/TLS and WRP largely stopped working. Python code became unmaintainable and there was no easy way to make it work on Windows, even under WSL.
• Version 3.0 (2019) has been rewritten in Go using Chromedp as browser-in-browser instead of http-proxy. The initial version was less than 100 lines of code.
• Version 4.0 has been completely refactored to use mouse clicks via imagemap instead parsing a href nodes.
• Version 4.1 added sending keystrokes in to input boxes. You can now login to Gmail. Also now runs as a Docker container and on Cloud Run/Azure Containers.
• Version 4.5 introduces rendering whole pages in to a single tall image with client scrolling.
• Version 4.6 adds blazing fast gif encoding by Hill Ma.

Credits

• Uses chromedp, thanks to mvdan for dealing with my issues
• Uses go-quantize, thanks to ericpauley for developing the missing go quantizer
• Thanks to Jason Stevens of Fun With Virtualization for graciously hosting my rumblings
• Thanks to claunia for help with the Python/Webkit version in the past
• Thanks to Hill Ma for ultra fast gif encoding algorithm
• Historical Python/Webkit versions and prior art can be seen in wrp-old repo

Legal Stuff

License: Apache 2.0
Copyright (c) 2013-2018 Antoni Sawicki
Copyright (c) 2019-2024 Google LLC