Git Hook, Line and Sinker

Selfhosting your git repositories is not a bad idea. In fact it is a great idea and it’s pretty simple too.

First you make a new directory on an accessible machine which by convention ends on .git. Something like /allmycode/repo1.git

Move into the directory and execute

 git init --bare --share

Great, we got ourselves a shareable git repository. If you dont’ want ro be the only one to be working on that repository and have no intention of making it public either you should create a user specific for git operations on the machine you serve your repositories from.
Let’s assume your specialized user is called “git”

You can now add ssh-public-keys from all parties that should have access on the repos via copy-ssh-id to /home/git/.ssh/id_rsa.pub and have a nice passwordless access-control.

Now we can start to work on the remote repository.
In you local working directory we

git init

and provide the user information that is used in the commit message

git config --global user.name "Your Name"

git config --gloabl user.email your@email.sth

This was all local, so let’s add the information about remote

git remote add origin git@server:/allmycode/repo1.git

this enables us to make a push to remote with the shorter

git push origin master

It is completely viable to add differently labeled remote repositories e.g.

 git remote add github sth@github

and push a specialised branch (without passwords for example) there via

 git push github public

Nice, self-hosted remote repositories! You can start collaborating. And when you do you, you might want to automate transferring the newest version to a testing server. You could do this with a cronjob and some copying, or, you could use git’s very own hooks, to be specific a post-push hook.
Connect to the remote repository and enter the directory hooks/. Here you find some nice samples, but we want something different. We want a post-receive hook, which means everytime somebody pushes changes to
the remote repository this action is called. So we create that hook:

touch post-receive

then we paste in

#!/bin/sh
GIT_WORK_TREE=/path/to/serverroot/ git checkout -f

and save. Make it executable and you made a git hook. Congrats!
Since we have a user named git who is the owner of all the repos on our remote machine we must add him to the group that controls the webserver paths (www-data or else) Full instructions to make the checkout work.

Now every push to the remote repository should trigger a checkout which hopefully makes the newest version available on the webserver.

But let’s tweak things a little. Say we want to be notified whenever a commit has been pushed. Email and telephone are viable but timeconsuming and you don’t want to, and frankly should not have to, bother. I think Jabber is a great way of getting the information across without spamming the whole team. So I made a little script to send a message to everybody who cares to give me his jabber-id. You can get it here via

git clone https://github.com/kodekitchen/punobo.git

If you add to the post-receive hook

 python /<path-to-repo>/pushbot.py "Something has been pushed."

not only will your testing/demo/development server automatically have been updated, but all listed members of the working group will be informed about it on Jabber.

Custom authentication in Django

After fiddling with Djangos auth-app for a while I decided t rather have my own (I know, why should one do this? Answer: To learn).
It consists of several steps:

1. registration
2. activation
3. adding a password
4. login

First I created an app for user-management

 $python manage.py startapp user_management    

This gave me the structure to work with.
First I created the usermodel:

 from django.db import models    
 import bcrypt    

 class User(models.Model):

    email = models.CharField(max_length=100, unique=True)
    firstname = models.CharField(max_length=30)
    lastname = models.CharField(max_length=30)
    password = models.CharField(max_length=128)
    last_login = models.DateTimeField(auto_now=True)
    registered_at = models.DateTimeField(auto_now_add=True)
    core_member = models.BooleanField()
    activation_key = models.CharField(max_length=50, null=True)    

The idea here was to have email as username and to have that unique. I don’t consider usernameshis is a good choice for logins but rather a feature for profiles, but that depends on one’s taste I think.

The registration view is pretty straight forward . I create a RegistrationForm object with fields for email, first and last name.
The activation_key is simply a string of randomly chosen ASCII characters and digits.
Activation itself is just creating a link, sending it and comparing the random part of the link and the stored string. If they match is_active is set to True and the user can set his/her password. For passwords I normally store bcrypt hashes in the database (NEVER! store plaintext passwords in a database!). This is quite simple and can be done by following this description.

The function for setting the password goes into the model. For this to work I use a classmethod. As the name suggests, this is a method bound to the class, not an instance of said class which allows to get objects as in “cls.objects.get()” which is the classmethod’s equivalent to self.something in instance methods.

@classmethod
def set_password(cls, user_id, plain_pass):    
    secret = bcrypt.hashpw(plain_pass, bcrypt.gensalt())
    user = cls.objects.get(pk=user_id)
    user.password = secret
    user.save()
    return True

The login process itself is done via another classmethod which I named authenticate:

@classmethod
def authenticate(cls, email, password, request):
    user = cls.objects.get(email__exact=email)
    if bcrypt.hashpw(password, user.password) == user.password:
        request.session['user_id'] = user.id
        user.save() # this is to get last_login updated
        return user
    else:
        return None

(In order for this to work you have to enable the session middleware and the session app in settings.py.)

So, a quick rundown.

Since I use email as an unique identifier for the login the function expects an email address which is used to find the person to authenticate, the plaintext password (e.g. as given from a inputfield) and the request object to make use of a session. (I use database session handling for development but there are alternatives described in the django docs.)

The bcrypt function returns True if given plaintext password hashed and the stored hash match False if not.

After haveing checkd that the user has given the right credentials I’m going to store the user_id in the session which allows me to get the full set of user information should I need it.

I save the user to trigger the auto_now function of the user model in which updates the last_login field to the actual time.

Now with

User.authenticate(email, password, request) 

the user is logged in.

Setting up my own flavour of Django

Okay, so I started doing stuff in python and of course stated playing around with django. And beeing used to padrinorb‘s convenient generators, I had to figure out how to get to my preferred setup. This is what I do:

1. Run

   django-admin.py startproject projectname

2. in settings.py
   add

   import os.path
   and add

   os.path.join(os.path.dirname(__file__), ('templates'))
   to TEMPLATE_DIRS

3. Make dir templates/ in the project folder
4. Make dir views/ in the project folder
5. Add an __init__.py file
6. import your views in __init__ (e.g.

   from index import hello
   if you have a view file called index.py containing a function hello())

7. In templates I put subdirs for all sites and a base.html which holds the frame for all sites.
8. Now in urls.py import all views via

   from views import *

So, this gives me a view and a template dir as well as a frame for the sites.

Now that I got the views and template going I would like to have a seperate dir for static contents. Django’s static dir is simply /static whih is fine by me, but making a directory named static and putting stuff in won’t do. You have to put


STATICFILES_DIRS = (os.path.join(os.path.dirname(__file__), 'static/'),)


After putting


{% load staticfiles %}


into the base.html. You can insert static files like css, image and so on by putting


{% static foo/bar.ext %}


into the template tag.

Legacy code and the “SuperProgrammer”

I started an online python course some days ago and part of the assignment is to peer evaluate other peoples code. The task was to print a message on the screen. Yes, I know, a boring task.
There I came upon something like this:

string = "xdxlxrxoxW xoxlxlxexH"
string = string[::-2]
print string

And this, in three lines, is the essence of problems I’ve encountered over the years with big complex projects and legacy code. Remarkably it seems to be a trap each projects “Super-Programmer” falls in…

1. Show-off programming
It’s okay to be proud of ones knowledge but, come on, this is about the job, not your ego.

2. The code is the documentation
NO, definitely not, code is just a small part of any bigger or more complex project. There ususally are configuration, directory structures, external dependencies (libraries) etc. Put it somewhere to be seen, the init file, a readme, a getting-started txt file but don’t assume.

3. Don’t oversmart
You found this very cool, super cryptic looking function that does unexpected thing… Yeah, probably use something that can be understood right away or at least leave a comment about what it does.

4. Modularize to death
Especially in ruby (but any other language as well) I found many people building modules around simple functions, meta programming things to bits and doing stuff they found in years old posts somewhere.
Those techniques are all good and useful at times but not every function is predestined to be reused in another project, so why not declare it a helper function?

In short:
1. Write code that can be read with by an average coder, not just by the “Super-Programmer”. Projects or companies dev teams seldom have an even knowledge distribution. (And in most cases you don’t even want that.)
2. Documentation!
3. Comments!
4. Put your ego aside. I rarely think stuff like “Oh my, he/she came up with a fancy solution”, mostly it is along the line of “WTF! Why didn’t he use the obvious solution?” So if there is a reason for doing it differently go back to point 2 or 3.

Ruby Shortcuts

I sometimes stumble upon little snippets of ruby code that can replace longer loops. Like this one:

array.reject!(&:empty?)


which eliminates all empty strings from an array of strings (does not work for Fixnum), which is quite handy following a “split” operation.

Another one is this:

array.inject(:+)


which sums up all elements in an array and also works for strings.

Automating virtualization with veewee and vagrant

In order to consolidate my development environment a friend (thank you @bascht) mentioned veewee to me. Veewee automates and simplifys vagrant basebox creation. It comes with a plethora of templates for operating systems and versions. I use it to quickly build Ubuntu server on VirtualBox.

I started with a standard template (vagrant basebox define ‘appbox’ ‘ubuntu-12.10-server-amd64’) and customized the postinstall.sh. Including replacing the ruby install with rvm. This leads to problems when using chef which I don’t necessarily use so I can live with the inconvenience rather than with having to ruby setups.

I keep my own definitions for veewee in a separate directory to be able to version control it. Basebox creation itself is done by a little script. This setup requires git, and VirtualBox to be installed. I clone veewee parallel to the directory holding my definitions.


cd ..
BASE=$(pwd)

echo “nnBuilding dbesbox and exportingnn”
if [ ! -d $BASE/veewee/definitions ]; then
mkdir $BASE/veewee/definitions/
fi
cp -r $BASE/my-devenv/appbox/ $BASE/veewee/definitions/appbox/
cp -r $BASE/my-devenv/databasebox/ $BASE/veewee/definitions/databasebox/
cd $BASE/veewee/
veewee vbox build ‘appbox’ —force
veewee vbox export ‘appbox’ —force
echo “nnDone building and exporting appboxnn”
mv $BASE/veewee/appbox.box $BASE/my-devenv/

veewee vbox build ‘databasebox’ —force
veewee vbox export ‘databasebox’ —force
echo “nnDone building and exporting databaseboxnn”
mv $BASE/veewee/databasebox.box $BASE/my-devenv/

cd $BASE/my-devenv/
veewee alias delete vagrant #Eradicate the “Gemfile could not be found” error
source ~/.zshrc

After building the two boxes I add them with

vagrant box add 'appbox' 'appbox.box'

and databasebox accordingly.

My Vagrantfile looks like this:

Vagrant::Config.run do |config|

config.vm.define :app do |app_config|
app_config.vm.box = "appbox"
app_config.vm.network :hostonly, "10.10.1.2" #10.10.1.1 is the host
app_config.vm.provision :shell, :path => "provisions/common_base.sh"
app_config.vm.provision :shell, :path => "provisions/app_base.sh"
end

config.vm.define :db do |db_config|
db_config.vm.box = “databasebox”
db_config.vm.network :hostonly, “10.10.1.3”
db_config.vm.provision :shell, :path => “provisions/common_base.sh”
db_config.vm.provision :shell, :path => “provisions/db_base.sh”
end

end

My provisioner is shell, but a »gem install chef« would enable you to use chef subsequently to provision. (Since rvm installation requires a closing and restarting of the shell or login/logout I found this to be more reliable.)

Now a simple ‘vagrant up’ starts both boxes and pointing the browser at 10.10.1.2 is answered by the nginx in appbox. My application is configured to use the db server at 10.10.1.3

Update on the .zshrc

I needed a little more information from my prompt so I extended it a bit

HISTFILE=~/.histfile
HISTSIZE=1000
SAVEHIST=1000
setopt autocd
setopt promptsubst

autoload -U colors && colors
autoload -Uz vcs_info && vcs_info

precmd() { vcs_info }
zstyle ‘:vcs_info:*’ enable git hg bzr
zstyle ‘:vcs_info:*’ check-for-changes true
zstyle ‘:vcs_info:*’ get-unapplied true
zstyle ‘:vcs_info:*’ unstagedstr “!”
zstyle ‘:vcs_info:*’ formats “%F{5}[%s:%r|%b]%u”
zstyle ‘:vcs_info:*’ actionformats “%F{5}[%s:%r|%b-%a]”

PROMPT=”%F{2}%n@%M:%F{6}%d%F{11}» “
RPROMPT=’${vcs_info_msg_0_}’

The result is a shell that lets me switch into a directory without typing cd and if the dir is version controlled it shows me the versioning system, the repo name, the branch I’m on and whether there are unstaged changes (indicated by !)

Datamapper – Padrino – warden

I took a break from coding, but was still looking for a useful set of tools for developing web applications. And I think I found a solution that fits my needs (small core but extensible, modular, reasonable features, usable documentation or active user groups at least).

The goal was to create a backend that would output json objects that could be processed in an independent frontend.

First step was to generate a project following the guide

padrino g project -d datamapper -a mysql -e none


I set renderer (-e option) to none because I am using rabl for templating the json output.
For authentication I chose warden. So I added these to the Gemfile

gem 'warden'
gem 'rabl'


Then turned to the app/app.rb and added

use Warden::Manager do |manager|
manager.default_strategies :password
manager.failure_app = myApp
end

Warden::Manager.serialize_into_session do |user|
user.id
end

Warden::Manager.serialize_from_session do |id|
User.get(id)
end


For creating the model I used the padrino generator again, since the user model is pretty straight forward (extend as needed)

padrino g model User username:string password:string email:string


After setting up config/database.rb you can create the database by using

padrino rake dm:create


To have some entries in the database to work with I costumize the db/seeds.rb which is mentioned in the padrino blog tutorial

Having done this warden should be in the system but is not working yet, since we have to define at least one strategy:

For now I like to use a common username/password login, which is already defined as default in manager.default_strategies. (You could add others if you wanted to, look at the warden-wiki for details)

Warden::Strategies.add(:password) do
def valid?
... code goes here ...
end
def authenticate!
... code goes here ...
? success!(user) : fail!("Invalid")
end
end


So in valid? you would define the requirements that have to be met to go on with the authentication process. In this case checking params[“username”] && params[“password”] would make sense.
After creating a usable authentication! function request to a controller can be authenticated via adding env[‘warden’].authenticate! before the login controller code.
If authentication was successful you can add env[‘warden’].authenticated? to following controllers and get the user (or what you decided to return for success) by calling env[‘warden’].user.

I tested this with curl, since the frontend is intended to be independent. I put the login process in a post route, so
after starting padrino

curl -d "username=...&password=..." localhost:3000/login


gave me the defined output of a successful login.

One pitfall when testing a subsequent controller with curl is that in contrast to a browser you have to add the cookie information. In order to get it you could call

curl -vvv -d "username=...&password=..." localhost:3000/login


and can extract the rack.session=… …; and call the controller with

curl --cookie "rack.session=... ...;" localhost:3000/subsequent_controller


Sinatra, Datamapper and CouchDB – a trainwreck

Just for purely educational reasons (why not) i decide to combine these three on heroku. The spoiler is already in the title: it didn’t work at all. Datamapper is quite cool and works great with the shared Postgres database, but don’t even bother to get the mongo or couch adapter working. Datamapper seems to gets massively reworked, maybe wait for this to be done and then try again. As for Postgres or MySQL it looks nice.

Sinatra, Mustache and Heroku – change of plans

Okay, I really like Mustache, it’s clean, it has a reasonably small set of options (conditionals, lists etc.) and has many implementations. One of them being javascript (Mustache.js).
So, i thought what about using Sinatra to generate JSON responses and serving templates, while the client is responsible for the representation. The benefit being a clean RESTful application and a deferred rendering process allowing to play with different options on caching JSON objects and exploring AJAX features.
And above all a fun project.
So, the basic idea:

1. the root path “/” reads an index html file and hands it out
2. navigation elements trigger to asynchronous AJAX requests (one for the template, one for the view)
3. when both are finished mustache.js kicks in and renders the page (or parts of it)

app.rb

get "/" do
  response = File.open("index.html").read
  "#{response}"
end

index.html

...
var template = null;
var view = null;
var templateFinished = false;
var viewFinished = false;

function getTemplate(template){
  [...] xhRequest [...]
  if(request.readyState == 4){
            template = req.responseText;
            templateFinished = true;
            process();
        }
  }

function getView(view){
  [...] xhRequest [...]
  if(request.readyState == 4){
            view = req.responseText;
            viewFinished = true;
            process();
        }
  }

function process(){
  if(templateFinished == true && viewFinished == true){
	document.getElementById("content").innerHTML = Mustache.to_html(template,view);
    }
    else{
        return;
      }
}

So, in my case the rendered stuff replaces the content in the div with the id “content”. To elaborate on that one could pass the id of the element to be replaced as an option to the function and really play with this.