TE
TechEcho
Home24h TopNewestBestAskShowJobs
GitHubTwitter
Home

TechEcho

A tech news platform built with Next.js, providing global tech news and discussions.

GitHubTwitter

Home

HomeNewestBestAskShowJobs

Resources

HackerNews APIOriginal HackerNewsNext.js

© 2025 TechEcho. All rights reserved.

Show HN: Interval, CLIs in browser with no front end code

58 pointsby alexarenaalmost 3 years ago
Hey HN,<p>I&#x27;m Alex, founder of Interval [0]. We’re bringing internal tools written like CLIs to the browser to make them more powerful, through a Node.js SDK which attaches them to a hosted dashboard without any frontend code. Large companies have full teams that work on internal dashboards and tooling. Interval brings that infrastructure to anyone.<p>In our previous project we had ~65 CLI scripts for tasks like provisioning user accounts, moderating content, and migrating data. These were quick to write and powerful. They also turned into an ongoing timesuck. Non-technical coworkers needed to bother an engineer every time to run one. Some of them were powerful enough to be footguns, and because we had to rewrite validation every time, we were always a bit scared of them.<p>We wanted to bring the power and speed of cranking out CLI scripts into the world of modern software development: testable, easy to expose to colleagues via a URL, and works with Everything Else by default. That’s why we made Interval.<p>We built:<p>- A Node.js + TypeScript SDK – this embeds in your backend codebase and provides APIs for defining tools + collecting input + displaying output. These APIs are simple awaitable functions that return parsed, validated, and soundly-typed user input. You put your Interval actions in source control, test them, run CI&#x2F;etc exactly like you do for all your other backend code.<p>- A hosted UI, which handles I&#x2F;O for the scripts in a less brittle way than command line arguments do, while also taking care of auth, permissions, and audit logs.<p>This lets you take your CLI commands out of an engineer’s terminal and share them with the whole company. Give support the ability to ban spammers but not drop the prod DB. Require two people for sensitive actions. Echo commands to a Slack channel. It’s a powerful set of primitives out of the box and lets you do anything else you want in the code you’re already writing, without making you have to spin up a second company just to support your internal tools.<p>Under the hood, your CLIs and the hosted dashboard talk through a 2-way message passing system. We felt this approach was the best of both worlds:<p>- UIs are hosted by Interval: We build, host, and maintain the part most people don&#x27;t care about for internal tools.<p>- Backends are self-hosted: We can&#x27;t see your business logic, secrets, etc.<p>We&#x27;re in public beta today. I hope you like it and I&#x27;m happy to answer any questions&#x2F;feedback in the comments.<p>[0]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;interval.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;interval.com</a>

7 comments

MatthiasPortzelalmost 3 years ago
I’m very excited by the idea of seamlessly providing a front-end for interactive scripts. (I have a similar idea that I’ve wanted to build for a while.)<p>Is that an accurate description of what you’re trying to build? Calling Interval a “CLI in the browser” made me think you had a command line in the browser, something like xterm.JS.<p>I don’t have anything else to say, I think the idea speaks for itself.
评论 #31675732 未加载
评论 #31657900 未加载
michaelvillaralmost 3 years ago
Loved using Interval in the past few months at height.app. I highly recommend it if you don&#x27;t want to bother building UI within your internal admin pages.
elsherbinialmost 3 years ago
I work in an academic lab and develop pipelines for processing raw data to get people tables to analyze. Would this be a good solution for me to allow labmates who aren&#x27;t very good with the command line to run those pipelines? We run the pipelines on HPC cluster, would I need to spin up a server that sits between the cluster and interval, or could I somehow run the backend directly on the cluster?
评论 #31658703 未加载
anitilalmost 3 years ago
This is really nice and I love the idea of giving non-technical users access to internal tooling.<p>For python scripts I&#x27;ve had some success with Gooey that turns an ArgParser description into a usable (if ugly) UI running locally.<p>At some point I tried to turn it into a web front end (probably called Wooey) but it ended up in the same pile of half-baked projects I have floating around.
评论 #31662156 未加载
DoryMinhalmost 3 years ago
I came across the concept a couple of times but I find it hard to get excited. I still use C# to create tools. I have total control and not sure it&#x27;s any less convenient than less-code platform like interval or even airplaine.
melonyalmost 3 years ago
Your competitors -&gt; <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.airplane.dev&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.airplane.dev&#x2F;</a>, <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;windmill.dev" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;windmill.dev</a>
评论 #31663712 未加载
jreynoldsdevalmost 3 years ago
Super interesting idea and great documentation. What software do you use for your user docs?
评论 #31689757 未加载