Stavros' Stuff

I recently installed Ubuntu Wacky Whatever, the latest version, and I’m very excited about it shipping with SSH 8.2, which means that I can finally use hardware USB keys for secure, easy to use authentication. If securing your devices has been something you’ve wanted to easily do yourself, read on, because it’s finally happening.

FIDO2

One of the most exciting security-related developments recently has been the development of WebAuthn and FIDO2, which are basically euphemisms for “nice security stuff”. In summary, WebAuthn and FIDO2 aim to make it really easy to use security devices with stuff by standardizing the way the two talk to each other, and using better terms than “stuff”.

This is great news for us, because now we can have dirt-cheap USB keys that can be used to secure all our authentication very easily, without requiring any special security knowledge. All you need to know to be completely immune to phishing, password theft, and a whole host of other ways of losing Bitcoin is to just plug your USB key in, press the little button/type your PIN/enter your fingerprint, and you’re logged in.

What does this have to do with SSH? Very little, but

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You know me, I’m a Django fan. It’s my preferred way of developing web apps, mainly because of the absolutely vast ecosystem of apps and libraries it has, and the fact that it is really well-designed. I love how modular it is, and how it lets you use any of the parts you like and forget about the ones you don’t want. This is going to be emphasized rather spectacularly in this article, as I’m going to do things nobody should ever have to do.

My only issue with Django was that it never really had a good way of making APIs. I hate DRF with somewhat of a passion, I always found its API way too complicated and verbose, and never managed to grok it. Even the simplest things felt cumbersome, and the moment your API objects deviated from looking exactly like your DB models, you were in a world of hurt. I generally prefer writing a simple class-based view for my APIs, but then I don’t get automatic docs and other niceties.

It’s no surprise, then, that when I found FastAPI I was really excited, I really liked its autogenerated docs, dependency injection system, and lack of magical “request” objects or big JSON blobs. It looked very simple, well-architected and with sane defaults, and I seriously considered developing the API for my company’s next product on it, but was apprehensive about two things: It lacked Django’s ecosystem, and it didn’t have an ORM as good and well-integrated as Django’s. I would also miss Django’s admin interface a lot. Three things.

It would have been great if FastAPI was a Django library, but I guess the asynchronicity wouldn’t have been possible. Still, there’s no reason for DRF not to have an API as nice as FastAPI’s, but there’s no helping that. A fantastical notion caught hold of me: What if I could combine FastAPI’s view serving with Django’s ORM and apps? Verily, I say unto thee, it would be rad.

And that’s exactly what I did. Here’s how:

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You might have noticed the buzz around WireGuard lately. WireGuard is a very simple VPN that uses state-of-the-art cryptography, and the buzz comes from both the fact that it’s simple and good at what it does, and the fact that it’s so good that it’s going to be included in the Linux kernel by default. Linus Torvalds himself said that he loves it, which took the software world by storm, as we weren’t aware that Linus was capable of love or any emotion other than perkele.

The only problem I’ve found with WireGuard is a lack of documentation, or rather a lack of documentation where you expect it. The quickstart guide, the first thing I look at, mentions a configuration file that it never tells you how to write, and it also assumes you’re more familiar with networking than I am.

Since the initial conditions at the creation of the universe set things up so WireGuard would eventually be underdocumented, I am going against Creation itself and showing you how to easily configure and run it. Let’s

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A few weeks ago, my task at work was an interesting one: To deploy a Kubernetes cluster and write the associated tooling so that developers can deploy the code in the branches they’re working on to it, so they can test their changes.

Until that point, I’ve been wanting to learn Kubernetes because it sounded interesting (even though the name is rather problematic when you’re Greek), but I never had an opportunity because I don’t have anything that needs to be on a cluster. So, I jumped at the chance, and started reading up on it, but all the materials (including the official tutorial) seemed too verbose and poorly-structured, so I was a bit dejected.

Anyway, after a few days of research, things finally just clicked and I was deploying machines left and right with wild abandon, quickly racking up thousands in AWS bills, like any self-respecting backend developer in 2018. Since my resume now said “Kubernetes expert”, a thought immediately occurred: “Why not take my vast, unending knowledge of this system that I have collected over hours of research and make it more accessible for people?” Since I couldn’t convince myself I shouldn’t write another rambling article, I quickly got to it.

This is

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Today, it got into my friend Harry’s head that he wants to buy a 3D printer. Normally, I would applaud the decision, so I did. I’ve bought lots of expensive crap I ended up regretting (damn you, quadcopters and photography), but the 3D printer wasn’t one of them. Sure, I don’t use it every day, but it’s amazing to be able to design small things for around the house or parts for hobby projects and seeing them turned into objects in a few minutes.

Since Harry has many questions, as I did when I was his age, I figured I’d answer them all in an article so more people can benefit from them. If you have questions that aren’t covered here, please tweet or toot them to me, and I might add them. Let’s start!

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Ever since I was a wide-eyed little boy, I would look up at the stars and wonder in wonder: “What if I could lease my very own, beefy, dedicated Hetzner server and have an easy way to deploy all my projects onto that?” But lo, my dreams were dashed because Docker wouldn’t be invented for another twenty years, and Hetzner did not accept Mastercard at the time.

Decades later, with Docker finally invented and Hetzner accepting all major credit cards, my dream lay all but forgotten, because Docker could not do zero-downtime deploys natively and I hated it. That was how things remained, until my friend Theodore told me that he tried Dokku and that it worked very well.

I had heard of Dokku (and Fig, Deis, Flynn, Kubernetes, etc etc), but I never paid too much attention, as these PaaSaaSes struck me as too webcale for my simple projects. All I wanted was a way to skip through all the boilerplate configuration of deploying a Django app, and Ansible wasn’t cutting it, as it was still too much plumbing.

Since Theodore tried it and said it was apparently pretty easy to deploy with, though, I figured I’d give it a shot and see. It helped that Dokku was explicitly designed to be light and self-contained, whereas Kubernetes is for much larger deployments, so Dokku fit my use case exactly.

Trying Dokku out

To try Dokku out, I needed a project. Luckily,

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