Simple Print Server - November 16, 2016

GitHub: simple_print_server

A roommate of mine (as of now) has a printer shared over the network from a Linux box. This was great for my mac, as everything worked as expected. However, none of us could get this printer working from windows 10. Instead of arguing with drivers or other hacked up solutions, I wrote this little flask app to provide a web interface to print from. It's super light and, mostly, just works. However, it should be noted that it makes absolutely zero attempt to be secure from unintended users. Maybe I'll add users in a future update, but that kinda starts to get in the way of the idea of just running it and being good to go.

All the app does is upload files (with minimal security) and call lpr filename on them. It does no checking for a printer, doesn't check if the print succeeded, won't know if the printer is borken, and makes no attempt to ensure the file even can be printed beyond a simple extension check. But, it works.