Interesting proposal but I have some concerns.

Protocol buffers are not meant to be used with large data sets as per documentation, sending the whole content of a file via gRPC is not a great idea I think.

But the major concern is about security, if the arduino-cli is running on a backend and any client can ask the content of any file that has permission to read you open up a BIG hole I think. Am not really confortable with this.

In the end I think this must not be a concern of the CLI, files exchange should be handled by another service.

@silvanocerza Yeah, your concerns are more than reasonable. I've been also thinking about that. It seems if we limit the paths to user and build dirs only (to be able to load the sketches and compiled binaries) it should be ok. Also we might register the service to the server only if daemon is started with a new --with-file-system flag (switched off by default), so users who intentionally want to run it for back-end use case will be able to do it (and the rest will be not affected at all).

If we're talking about sketches and compiled binaries - they don't exceed kilobytes (megabytes max), so size seems to be not a huge issue. Also we can compress (see Type = raw/zip/etc) to reduce the size if still having some concerns on it.

I also agree that external (dedicated) service should do it better, but imo it's very small additional feature to provide a full set of needed functional so it seems to be not a big deal. I doubt that average user will be able to install smth like https://github.com/hubot-grpc/filesystem-grpc and want to deal with dockers, daemons, etc.

But instead it will allow users to use their laptops/desktops or even Raspi's with arduino-cli to compile for Arduino from any mobile client (smartphones, tablet, smart devices, etc).

@4ntoine

But instead it will allow users to use their laptops/desktops or even Raspi's with arduino-cli to compile for Arduino from any mobile client (smartphones, tablet, smart devices, etc).

This is a use case I was interested in, but I have opted for running CLI on a Pi, editing files over SSH and then running the appropriate command over SSH with the board attached to the Pi's USB port.
Have you thought about "mapping" the remote FS using SAMBA?
You could in theory configure the CLI to have the paths required be subfolders of that mounted path.
Not sure it would work on iPad, though

directories:
  data: /Users/ubi/Library/Arduino15
  downloads: /Users/ubi/Library/Arduino15/staging
  user: /data/Dropbox/AppsDocuments/Arduino

@ubidefeo

yes, i tried different scenarios including samba (and it worked).

I'm thinking about "average user" and Arduino is awesome due to it's simplicity. So imo if it costs only 42 lines of code as in this MR lot's of people will say "thank you guys for doing our life easier"

@silvanocerza will it work for you to address security concerns? i can update the MR

@per1234 can you please close this? It's sitting in my list of open PRs that mention me since forever. 😅

Thanks! <3

Closing as stale