Go-SSB Room

This repository contains code for a Secure Scuttlebutt Room (v1+v2) server, written in Go.

It includes:

• secret-handshake+boxstream network transport, sometimes referred to as SHS, using secretstream
• muxrpc handlers for tunneling connections
• a fully embedded HTTP server & HTML frontend, for administering the room

Features

• Rooms v1 (tunnel.connect, tunnel.endpoints, etc.)
• Simple allow-listing, administerd via the web dashboard
• Sign-in with SSB
• Alias managment

Development

To get started, you need a recent version of Go. v1.16 and onward should be sufficient.

To build the server and see a list of its options:

cd cmd/server
go build
./server -h
 
Usage of ./server:
  -dbg string
    	listen addr for metrics and pprof HTTP server (default "localhost:6078")
  -lishttp string
    	address to listen on for HTTP requests (default ":3000")
  -lismux string
    	address to listen on for secret-handshake+muxrpc (default ":8008")
  -nounixsock
    	disable the UNIX socket RPC interface
  -logs string
    	where to write debug output to (default is just stderr)
  -repo string
    	where to put the log and indexes (default "/home/cryptix/.ssb-go-room")
  -shscap string
    	secret-handshake app-key (or capability) (default "1KHLiKZvAvjbY1ziZEHMXawbCEIM6qwjCDm3VYRan/s=")
  -version
    	print version number and build date

If you want to view the development server in your browser:

# change to the root of the project (e.g. cd go-ssb-room) and generate the frontend's styling; requires npm
go generate -tags dev ./...
# now let's build & run the development server
cd cmd/server && go build -tags dev && ./server
# and visit http://localhost:3000

This can be useful if you are working on:

• the sqlite migrations,
• html templates,
• or website assets

This way, the build won't use the assets embedded in the binary, but instead read them directly from the local filesystem.

Once you are done with your changes and want to update the embedded assets:

# cd to the root of the folder, and then run go generate
go generate -tags dev ./...

Tooling

Mocks

counterfeiter enables generating mocks for defined interfaces. To update the mocks, run go generate in package roomdb.

• TODO: setup tool as dependency (no manual install)

Database schema

This project uses sql-migrate to upgrade the sqlite database when necessary.

To upgrade, create a new file in admindb/sqlite/migrations with your changes.

Note: similar to the web assets, you need to use go test -tags dev to test them. Afterwards run, go generate to embed the assets in the code and thus the resulting server binary.

No ORM

We use sqlboiler to generate type-safe Go code directly from SQL statements and table definitions. This approach suits the programming language much more then classical ORM approaches, which usually rely havily on reflection for (un)packing structs.

To generate them run the following commands. This will populate admindb/sqlite/models:

• (TODO: automate this with go generate)

# also included as generate_models.sh
cd admindb/sqlite
go test
sqlboiler sqlite3 --wipe

The generated package admindb/sqlite/models is then used to implemente the custom logic of the different services in admindb/sqlite.

Aside: I would have used sqlc since it's a bit more minimal and uses hand written SQL queries instead of generic query builders but it currently doesn't support sqlite.

Development user creation

cmd/insert-user contains code to create a fallback user. Build it and point it to your database with a username:

cd cmd/insert-user
go build
# optional step: run a script to generate a valid ssb id @<pubkey>.ed25519, useful for trying things out quickly
./generate-fake-id.sh   
./insert-user -name <username> -key <@pubkey.ed25519>

Then repeat your password twice and you are all set for development.

Run insert-user without any flags to see all the options.

Testing

Rooms

The folder tests/nodejs contains tests against the JavaScript implementation. To run them, install node and npm and run the following:

cd tests/nodejs
npm ci
go test

Web Dashboard

The folder web/handlers contains the HTTP handlers for the dashboard. Each subfolder comes with unit tests for the specific area (like auth, news, etc.). Simply run go test in one of them or run go test ./web/... in the root of the repo to test them all.

Authors

• cryptix (@p13zSAiOpguI9nsawkGijsnMfWmFd5rlUNpzekEE+vI=.ed25519)

License

MIT