Plover WebSocket Server

A WebSocket server for exposing Plover events and controlling Plover from an external program.

This plugin is available on GitHub and PyPI (under the name plover-engine-server-2). Report all bugs on GitHub.

Installation

Download the latest version of Plover for your operating system from the releases page. Only versions 4.0.0.dev8 and higher are supported.

1. Open Plover
2. Navigate to the Plugin Manager tool
3. Select the "plover-engine-server-2" plugin entry in the list
4. Click install
5. Restart Plover

The same method can be used for updating and uninstalling the plugin.

Configuration

To configure the plugin, create a file named plover_engine_server_config.json inside Plover's configuration directory (same directory as plover.cfg file).

Example content:

{
  "host": "localhost",
  "port": 8086,
  "secretkey": "mysecretkey",
  "ssl": {
    "cert_path": "/path/to/cert.pem",
    "key_path": "/path/to/key.pem"
  }
}

All fields are optional, except if you have either specified a cert_path or a key_path. In that case you have to make sure that the path pair is properly set there. The default is included in the example above.

How to Use

• Enable it in Configure -> Plugins
• Connect to either ws://localhost:8086/websocket or wss://localhost:8086/websocket, depending on whether or not you have specified SSL configuration, with your client and get the data pushed to you as event: data formatted JSON.

Received data format

Search for occurrences of queue_message in plover_engine_server/manager.py, or write an example program (or use the existing plover_engine_server/websocket/example_client.py) and observe its output.

Controlling Plover from other programs:

• Sending 'close' disconnects you.
• Sending a valid JSON string will execute the specified action. For example {"stroke": ["S-"]} (note that invalid keys are silently dropped), or {"translation": "abc"}.

Note: to avoid Plover being controlled by a malicious website, you should set some other than default key, and add the secret key to the request header X-Secret-Token.

If there's some error during the execution, it will be silently ignored and printed on stderr.

If the "force" key is true then the command will be executed even when the engine is turned off. Note that {PLOVER:RESUME} will have no effect in that case.

Because the Plover inner working is closely tied to the assumption that strokes can only come from the keyboard, when {PLOVER:RESUME} (or a command with similar effect, such as {PLOVER:TOGGLE}) is sent and the machine is "Keyboard" then some characters before the cursor will be deleted. To prevent this, set the "zero_last_stroke_length" key to true. Note This should be used very sparingly because it may have unintended effects.