While Bash scripts are the glue that holds the GNU/Linux back end together, a web-based front end makes these scripts more user-friendly for end users. In the last decade, web user interfaces (web UIs) have become the front end of choice, even for daily local desktop usage. However, creating a web UI takes some effort, even for very simple interfaces, because a web UI requires using HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and more.
Luckily, two free and open source utilities, OliveTin and Script Server, let you create a web UI for your scripts without writing a single line of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript (and its hundreds of web UI libraries). In this article, I will show you how to create a simple web UI to drive your scripts with OliveTin, followed by…