telnetify is a tool for local development of TELNET applications.

It has two important limitations:

Synopsis

telnetify command [command arguments]

Status

Build Status

Installation

This project uses Cargo for package management.

http://doc.crates.io/

From a clean checkout, you should be able to build and install telnetify with a single command.

~$ cargo install

Exposition

To understand telnetify, it's important to know that TELNET is a negotiation protocol.

https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc854

This may not be particularly obvious since more modern use of telnet (for example, testing an HTTP or SMTP server) does not actually use the TELNET protocol!

With that in mind, there are really two ways to go about developing a TELNET server.

One of the potential downsides of the latter approach is needing an easy way to hook your application up to a TELNET client for development purposes.

Fortunately, that's exactly what telnetify addreses.

Demonstration

Let's demonstrate with Nyancat!

http://nyancat.dakko.us/

~$ git clone https://github.com/klange/nyancat.git
~$ cd nyancat
~/nyancat$ make
~/nyancat$ telnetify src/nyancat -t