Jul 5, 2017 Tags: devblog, kbsecret, programming, ruby
The KBSecret 0.6.x line has officially begun! 0.6.0 was released on 7/1, followed by 0.6.1 on 7/4 and 0.6.2 today (7/5).
These updates bring a few substantial improvements…
The fields within KBSecret record types can now be marked as either “sensitive”
(the default) or “non-sensitive.” This provides a much-needed hint to commands
like kbsecret new, which used to be overly conservative during user input,
echoing nothing back to the user:
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# old
$ kbsecret new login top-secret-website
Username? # not echoed!
Password? # not echoed!
# new
$ kbsecret new login top-secret-website
Username? bob # correctly echoed!
Password? # not echoed, since passwords are sensitive!
Of course, this works for non-login types as well:
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$ kbsecret new env top-secret-api
Variable? TOP_SECRET_API # correctly echoed!
Value? # not echoed, since environment values are sensitive!
$ kbsecret new snippet not-so-secret
Code? curl example.com # correctly echoed!
Description? fetches site # correctly echoed!
The actual library change for this functionality is relatively minor, as can
be seen in the KBSecret::Record::Login class.
The old data definition:
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class Login < Abstract
data_field :username
data_field :password
end
And the new:
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class Login < Abstract
data_field :username, sensitive: false
data_field :password
end
Can you spot the difference? 😉
0.5.x brought some nice error handling in the form of the messages produced
by Dreck.parse, but 0.6.x takes it to the next level in terms of coverage
and consistency:
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# correct arity/argument length checking
$ kbsecret new
Fatal: Too few arguments given (0, expected >=2).
# correct reporting of unknown flags
$ kbsecret list --quux
Fatal: Unknown option '--quux'.
# ensuring a session exists
$ kbsecret list --session quux
Fatal: Unknown session: 'quux'.
# in the rare event of corrupted/bad session data (more on this below)
$ kbsecret env --show-all
Fatal: Failed to load record in file: top-secret-api.json.
The best part: all of the above errors are generated and propagated programmatically,
with no ugly die if or abort if logic! 1
This is done by identifying as many potential exceptions as possible during the
option and argument parsing phase, and then propagating them as exceptions. From
KBSecret::CLI:
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def initialize(&block)
@trailing = ARGV
guard { instance_eval(&block) }
end
def guard
yield
rescue => e
die "#{e.to_s.capitalize}."
end
0.5.6 included
ensure_session!
as a way to catch incorrect (i.e., nonexistent) sessions during the option and
argument parsing phase.
0.6.x expands this to produce CLI#session, eliminating the need to
call Session.new label: :foo explicitly in nearly all circumstances.
The old style:
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session = Session.new label: cmd.opts[:session] # the value of --session
label = session[label]
…and the new style:
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label = cmd.session[label]
As mentioned above, this allows us to catch an entire class of session errors (corrupted data, etc) far earlier.
When it does become necessary to instantiate a KBSecret::Session explicitly,
we can use CLI#guard to take care of any potential exceptions.
Old:
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Session.new label: :whatever # user might see exceptions!
New:
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cmd.guard { Session.new label: :whatever } # user sees error messages!
In 0.5.x, every non-builtin kbsecret command was guaranteed to take two
flags: --help for a simple help message, and --introspect-flags for a
dump of flags and subcommands recognized by the command.
In 0.6.x, I added two more universal flags: --verbose (-V) and --no-warn (-w).
These can be used to enable and suppress verbose and warning messages, respectively,
on the standard error stream. CLI#info and CLI#warn are the corresponding methods.
Since four universal flags is a bit much to document individually for each individual
kbsecret command, I moved their documentation to only
kbsecret(1) under
“UNIVERSAL COMMAND OPTIONS”.
Documentation-wise, I fixed a weird formatting error in the YARD documentation by deleting some superfluous comments and reported the bug upstream.
Stay tuned for KBSecret 0.7.x!
- William
There are a few places left where errors are propagated manually, but none of these examples are cases of those. ↩