Utilities for creating and working with software projects

Secrets

This operation allows confidential files to be encrypted and stored within a git repo.

It is assumed there is a directory <repo_root>/secrets, whose confidential files are omitted from git by use of its .gitignore file.

encrypt mode (encrypt = true)

All the files within <repo_root>/secrets (except entity_info.json) are zipped up, and the zip file is AES encrypted, using the passphrase provided by the user. The resulting file is stored in <repo root>/project_config/encrypted_secrets.bin, and this file is tracked by git.

The special handling of entity_info.json is because this file serves to identify the current machine's device, its id, os, etcetera. This file is not included in the encrypted secrets file, as it will be created by the decrypt operation.

decrypt mode (encrypt = false)

The file <repo root>/project_config/encrypted_secrets.bin is decrypted (using the passphrase), and the resulting zip file is unzipped into <repo_root>/secrets (deleting this directory beforehand if necessary!).

The appropriate entity info is read from the entity map (using the supplied entity id as a key) and is written to <repo_root>/secrets/entity_info.json.

linode stuff

Is the authorized_users field necessary?

It is poorly documented, and I don't know what relationship if any it has with authorized_keys. I now think that it refers to Linode users, and not Ubuntu users.

To keep things simple, I'll just run as root on the linode instances.

How do I create a user (with home directory) from the API?

I'm just going to run as root, and it creates a home directory for root already.

Silencing the welcome message and last logged in when ssh'ing

https://serverfault.com/questions/407033/how-can-i-edit-the-welcome-message-when-ssh-start

In the root home directory, type touch ~/.hushlogin to suppress these messages.

Prep operation

This operation will operate on a software project directory tree, parsing regular expressions that define modification operations, such as:

• delete a particular function invocation or code section, e.g. deb_print(x, "hello");
• replace a particular section of code with a (currently commented-out) alternative, e.g.

      // {~ 
      // This code will be replaced
      //
      do_algorithm_debug(data, "notes");
      //
      // ~|~  
      //  // It will be replaced with this code (with first column of '//' deleted):
      //  //
      //  do_algorithm(data);
      //
      // ~} 

• delete an entire file or subdirectory

It will read a 'source' git branch, and construct a set of modifications to apply to a different, 'target' git branch. The idea is that the target branch can be pushed (shared) as the 'production' version of the code, while leaving the source branch available for development purposes.