Foolscap-0.4.2 released
I've released foolscap-0.4.2 .. download it from http://foolscap.lothar.com/trac .
I made the relase last week, and as usual I've managed to not send out the announcement email yet. One reason for that is that I wanted to blog about it first, and I've started using a foolscap-0.4.2 -based tool to manage my blog, and I effectively got into a circular dependency between the blog and the blog software, with the email depending upon both.
The big new feature in this release is the "FooLscap APPlication SERVER", or "flappserver". It's like twistd for foolscap, enabling non-programmers to deploy pre-written tools without needing to write new code. twistd makes it easy to create and launch things like a web server or FTP server. flappserver makes it easy to create and launch a service which is accessed remotely via a secure FURL. There is a corresponding "flappclient" which takes a FURL (and some arguments) and does something with that service. The service runs as whichever user started the server, and it's easy to daemonize the server and run it in the background. Typically you'd start the server from a @reboot crontab entry or /etc/init.d script or LaunchAgent.plist file.
Eventually flappserver will have a plugin mechanism, but for now it comes with two remarkably useful basic services. The first is named "upload-file": the client provides the file and basename, the server provides the directory. It's like a write-only drop-box, accessed with a FURL. This is great for buildslaves that need to drop a generated package into some world-visible directory: the buildslave can touch that one directory and no others, and there are no funny filenames or shell-escape tricks it can use to break out of there.
The second service is named "run-command": the server controls everything about the command: executable, arguments, and working directory. The client just gets to push the button. It's like a remote-garage-door-opener for program execution. Optionally, the client can pass stdin and get stdout, letting you use it like a secure network pipe to a server that's run on-demand, sort of like inetd but with actual security.
It is nominally possible to do this sort of thing over SSH, but you have to start by creating a keypair for each purpose and add it to your authorized_keys file, and then figure out what sort of command= option to add to keep that key from being able to control your entire account (which usually means writing a script to implement the exact functionality you do want to offer), then hope that nothing they sent as an environment variable will compromise your security, then give them the 600-plus--character-long pubkey, then have them write a script which translates their input arguments into some "ssh -i single-purpose-pubkey hostname args-for-processing" command.
With a running flappserver, it's just:
flappserver add ~/server upload-file ~/incoming # returns FURL
flappclient --furl FURL upload-file foo.jpg
As a demo of what you can do with those two tools, I've started to update this very blog's back-end Git repository over a flappserver-based connection. The half-a-dozen computers that I use all have a copy of the "update my blog" FURL (really the "run git-daemon in the blog entries directory" FURL). The details are in the foolscap source tree, in doc/examples (in TRUNK, not in 0.4.2). More about this in the next post.