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Webdiff as a standalone web service #255
Description
I see that currently webdiff is used as a command line tool. I am wondering whether with the current architecture it would be possible to use webdiff as a standalone web service or UI where users can upload two files for comparison?
This would mean that webdiff needs to run inside docker as a persistent running application, is that possible?
As context, I imagine the following case as a starting point:
- Third party app retrieves 2 versions of a text file(eg. an old SOP and a new one with updated instructions).
- Third party app passes the files to webdiff and webdiff returns a unique url(the url could expire after a certain period, like 24 hours, after which the files are cleaned from webdiff).
- Third party app passes the url to the end user.
- End user opens the url and sees the differences in the webdiff UI.
I would be open to work on this PR if given some guidance.
Activity
danvk commentedon Jul 13, 2025
It would definitely be possible. It's such a different use case, though, that you might be better off creating a separate repo that has webdiff as a dependency. You'd just be using the webdiff UI (
static/js/file_diff.jsin the distributed version) in that case.