What's it all about, Alfie?

This morning I did a little looking for any tools that worked in the clj/deps system that was like the Leiningen plugins that did color syntax highlighting, and data formatting that I find very useful when the result of a function is a complicated data structure, or a sequence. I have been using whidbey as it works just fine with JDK 11 and any Clojure past 1.8.

The issue is that a good friend switched to the clj/deps package management and build tool for Clojure, and likes it quite a lot. So I've been trying to built up a way to do the same kinds of things in that ecosystem as with Leiningen. I didn't have a lot of luck the last time I looked, but maybe something was out there now? Or maybe I'd get a little lucky on the words I used in the search?

I found something that was close: rebel-readline. This is nice in that it's a simple readline replacement for the REPL, so it's not something that has to have a special environment - or a different app. I liked that it was able to do a lot of things on the readline that whidbey couldn't - because whidbey wasn't really active on the "read part" of the REPL - but more really on the "print part". This was nice, and I really liked that it was capable of showing the Clojure docs on the function - and it was fast, so that's a plus... but almost by definition - it wouldn't do anything on the output. So that wasn't as successful as I'd hoped.

Then a friend pointed out Reveal - and this was a lot more than I was looking for - the graphs, the processing of the output... this is a lot more like Gorilla REPL, that I've used, and written about in the past. It's all done in a browser, and Reveal is in a terminal session - so it's not exactly the same - but it's certainly something that is more of a joint "formatter and visualization tool" than just syntax highlighting and formatting of the REPL output.

I'll keep the links around, and maybe someone will write something like rebel-readline - but for the print (output) loop for the REPL... that would be nice. Until then, we carry on...

I've tried a couple of times to run a Jetty web server in a Clojure project on a GitHub Codespace, and the directions for port forwarding are very clear, and very easily done in the IDE, but when I try to "Open in Browser" - while in Safari on my iPad, I get nothing. And when I "Copy URL" I get 127.0.0.1:8080 which is "correct" as far as the documentation goes, but it's not working because in a browser, there's no way a browser page can redirect the localhost address.

So the only way this is going to work is if the VS Code IDE can open up a web page to the back-end, and show it there. Or... if they can open up ports based on the URL to get to the Codespace. They are all unique, so it's not impossible to image that... but it'd take work.

This is going to be important because as you develop things, you need to be able to interact with them, and being able to hit a web server, or a RESTful interface is kinda important. But hey... this is still in beta, and I noticed this morning that they have been making changes to the Codespaces page on GitHub, so I'll give them time.

This morning I wanted to see if I could get a more convenient method of getting to the attached Docker postgres server on GitHub Codespaces. The defaults of localhost, on port 5432 are standard, but if the machine can do unix sockets, then that's the preferred default. So there's the rub - the Codespaces images are Ubuntu, but they aren't set up for that - Docker maintaining the independent images and mounts for data. So I had to try something different.

I had previously tried using the pgpass file, but while that was easy to set up, it wasn't assuming precedence over the unix sockets... so that was a bust. The next thing I tried was to use the environment variables: PGHOST, PGPORT, PGUSER - and once I set those:

  $ export PGHOST=localhost
  $ export PGPORT=5432
  $ export PGUSER=postgres

then I could use:

  $ psql postgres

and other postgres commands like:

  $ createdb advent

to make a new database that I could reach with:

  $ psql advent

This is exactly what I was looking for! At this point, I could use the Codespaces for all the kind of development I was looking to do. Just fantastic! 🙂

I then updated the .bashrc and .zshrc files in my dotfiles repo so that any new Codespaces I would make have these baked in. I just need to get the Codespaces support directory into each project, and that will spin up just exactly what I need. Very nice indeed.

Today I noticed that a new beta of iTerm2 was out, and as part of the update, there is - of course - a restart of the app. But something I noticed, quite by accident, was that if you double-clicked on the tab title, iTerm2 would bring up a nice dialog box where you can enter the name of the tab, or even evaluate a function for the name of the tab.

In the past, I always had the ANSI escape codes to set the name to the current directory, and that was nice, but it also wasn't exactly what I wanted for a lot of my development work - because the tabs there need to have fixed names for the repo, or the function of the terminal, etc. So I had made a simple script functions:

  #
  # These are simple functions that can't be expressed as aliases, but
  # are very simple, and can go here because they are simple.
  #
  function winname() {
    echo -ne "ESC]0;$1^G"
  }
 
  function tabname() {
    echo -ne "ESC]1;$1^G"
  }
 
  function fixwt() {
    unset PROMPT_COMMAND
    if [ "$1" != "" ]; then
      winname "$1"
    fi
  }

so that I could easily override the PROMPT_COMMAND setting of the cwd, and the title would be fixed. It worked, but it meant that every time I had to restart iTerm2, I had to update all the shells with a fixit name, where name was the fixed name I wanted on that terminal tab.

But with this new iTerm2 feature, I don't have to do that.

I can simply set each one with the title I want, and leave those blank that will default to the PROMPT_COMMAND setting, and then they survive restarts! Amazing. 🙂

Yes, it's not really all that shocking, but for many years, I've hoped to have this feature, and now it's here, and I can restart my iTerm2 app, and not have to spend the next several minutes typing the same fixwt titles over and over. It's very nice.

Now if iTerm2 could remember the Spaces the windows were on... now that would be really nice! 🙂

This morning I was able to make a stripped-down dotfiles GitHub repo that Codespaces will use when a new Docker image is created. If there is a install file in the repo, it'll be executed after cloning the repo to the new user - as specified in the Dockerfile's USER variable.

So in my Dockerfile I now have:

  # Make my user for when we really get going, and pull in my env from GitHub
  ARG USERNAME=drbob
  ARG USER_UID=1001
  ARG USER_GID=$USER_UID
 
  # Create the user and add him to the sudoers so that he can install more stuff
  RUN groupadd --gid $USER_GID $USERNAME \
      && useradd --uid $USER_UID --gid $USER_GID -m $USERNAME \
      && apt-get update \
      && apt-get install -y sudo \
      && echo $USERNAME ALL=\(root\) NOPASSWD:ALL > /etc/sudoers.d/$USERNAME \
      && chmod 0440 /etc/sudoers.d/$USERNAME
 
  # [Optional] Set the default user. Omit if you want to keep the default as root.
  USER $USERNAME

and that lands me in the repo's home directory, but I still have to clean up the dotfiles repo, and all the permissions from the last post. To do that, I made a simple function in my ~/.bashrc that does all that:

  #
  # This is a simple function to cleanup the GitHub Codespace once it's been
  # created. Basically, I need to remove the left-overs of the dotfiles setup
  # and clean up the permissions on all the files.
  #
  function cleanup () {
    pushd $HOME
    echo "cleaning up the dotfiles..."
    rm -rf dotfiles install README.md
    echo "resetting the ownership of the workspace..."
    sudo chown -R drbob:drbob workspace
    echo "cleaning up the permissions on the workspace..."
    sudo chmod -R g-w workspace
    sudo chmod -R o-w workspace
    sudo setfacl -R -bn workspace
    echo "done"
    popd
  }

At this point, I can launch a Codespace, it'll have all my necessary environment, and I can continue to refine it in my dotfiles repo as that's only being used for the set-up of these Codespaces. So it's easy to remove things I'll never need there, and make sure it's customized to the things that I do need there.

Very nice. 🙂

Late last week, I was accepted into the GitHub Codespaces beta program, and since I've been looking for something to do coding on my iPadPro, and was doing a little work with GitPod, it was something I was really interested in seeing and comparing with GitPod. So I started with two of the projects I've put into GitPod: Advent of Code, and CQ.

First things, Codespaces is a similar in that it's all about Docker images of the repos with enough of a system wrapped around it to enable the style of development needed. Java, Ruby, Node, Rust - if you can do it on Debian or Ubuntu, then you can do it in Codespaces. It's just that universal.

It's also possible to run other images, like Postgres, Mongo, MySQL, and then have them linked up to the repo's instance so that you can refer to the databases off of localhost and the default port. That's really nice.

It's not particularly easy - unless you really understand Dockerfiles... but if you keep at it, they have examples, and for the most part, you'll be able to get something going, and it's all in the repo, so it's simple enough to drop the image, and create another. It just takes time.

What I did find interesting is that the default user for Codespaces is root. I was not at all interested in working as root - even on a Docker image... it's just too uncomfortable. Thankfully, there is a vscode user you can use, and the USER directive in the Dockerfile will drop you into that user when things get started.

The next thing is the permissions... it's wild... everything is open to the world, and again, while this may be "fine" - it's very uncomfortable for me, so I converted the ownership of the workspace to the vscode user, and then removed the additional ACL security with:

  $ cd /home/vscode
  $ sudo chown -R vscode:vscode workspace
  $ sudo chmod -R g-w workspace
  $ sudo chmod -R o-w workspace
  $ sudo setfacl -R -bn workspace

With these done, the directory is owned by vscode and it's respecting the normal umask values on the creation of new files.

In the future, I'm going to have to figure out how to personalize the codespace by using the dotfiles repo in GitHub, and then installing my dot files and updating all these permissions, etc. as well. If I get to have several of these, it'll pay off to have it all done properly from the start...