Reloading config without a restart
A config file changes. Someone edits a setting, rotates a credential, flips a feature flag. How does the running process find out? For most processes the answer is blunt: it doesn’t, until you restart it. For a …
Tags
34 pages
Go
Verifying your own downloads: how I solved it for self-updating CLI tools
Way back in the introduction I promised I’d come back to the self-update integrity checks. Here we are. And the starting point is a slightly uncomfortable admission: for a good long while, go-tool-base’s update command …
What survives a port, and what doesn't
Rebuilding go-tool-base in Rust turned out to be the most honest design review I’ve ever sat through, and I didn’t have to do anything except keep going. Porting a framework into a language with completely different …
rust-tool-base: the same idea, in a language that argues back
I built go-tool-base because I was sick of rebuilding the same CLI scaffolding every time I started a new Go tool. You’d think that would have taught me a lesson about doing things more than once. Apparently not, because …
The blank import that keeps a dependency out of your binary
go-tool-base can stash your credentials in the OS keychain, which most people building on it are perfectly happy about. But some of them ship into regulated and air-gapped environments where the binary isn’t permitted to …
Where should a CLI keep your API keys?
Your CLI tool needs the user’s API key. It has to come from somewhere, and it has to survive between runs, so the obvious move is to ask once and write it into the config file. One tidy api_key: line. Job done. It works …
A configurable AI endpoint is an attack surface
“Let users point at their own AI endpoint” is one of those config options that looks completely harmless on the way in. People want it, for perfectly good reasons. Then you sit with it for a minute and realise you’ve …
Redacting the secret you didn't know was in the string
Dammit! How did that get there? A log line that should never have existed. Not a password I’d carelessly printed, nothing as obvious as that. An upstream API handed me back an error, and it had quoted my own bearer token …
I had the framework audited: every finding was the same shape
When a real security audit lands back in your inbox, the temptation is to read it as a shopping list of unrelated mistakes. Fix one, fix the next, tick them off, move on. I did exactly that the first time. The second …
A mutex on a flag nobody writes twice
“Why is there a mutex around a boolean that only ever gets set once?” It’s a fair question, and I’d half-asked it of myself before someone asked it of me. The answer turns out to be written, in as many words, in a code …
