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* Define a generic "Failed" case for app-level errors (and a few others).Owen Jacobson2025-11-25
| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | We were previously exporting root causes from one layer of abstraction to the next. For example, anything that called into the database could cause an `sqlx::Error`, so anything that transitively called into that logic exported a `Database(sqlx::Error)` error variant of its own, using `From` to map errors from inner type to outer type. This had a couple of side effects. First, it required each layer of error handling to carry with it a `From` implementation unwrapping and rewrapping root causes from the next layer down. This was particularly apparent in the event and boot endpoints, which had separate error cases unique to crypto key processing errors solely because they happened to involve handling events that contained those keys. There were others, including the pervasive `Database(sqlx::Error)` error variants. Separately, none of the error variants introduced for this purpose were being used for anything other than printing to stderr. All the complexity of From impls and all the structure of the error types was being thrown away at top-level error handlers. This change replaces most of those error types with a generic `Failed` error. A `Failed` carries with it two pieces of information: a (boxed) underlying error, of any boxable `Error` type, and text meant to explain the context and cause of an error. Code which acts on errors can treat `Failed` as a catch-all case, while individually handling errors that signify important cases. Errors can be moved into or out of the `Failed` case by refactoring, as needed. The design of `Failed` is heavily motivated by [anyhow's `context` system][context] as a way for the programmer to capture immediate intention as an explanation for some underlying error. However, instead of accepting the full breadth of types that implement `Display`, a `Failed` can only carry strings as explanation. We don't need the generality at this time, and the implementation underlying it is pretty complex for what it does. [context]: https://docs.rs/anyhow/latest/anyhow/struct.Error.html#method.context This change also means that the full source chain for an error is now available to top-level error handlers, allowing more complete error messages. For example, starting `pilcrow` with an invalid network listen address produces Failed to bind to www.google.com:64209 Caused by: Can't assign requested address (os error 49) instead of the previous Error: Io(Os { code: 49, kind: AddrNotAvailable, message: "Can't assign requested address" }) which previously captured the same _cause_, but without the formatting (see previous commit) and without the _context_ (this commit). Similar improvements are available for many of the error scenarios Pilcrow is designed to give up on. When deciding which errors to use `Failed` with, I've used the heuristic that if something can fail for more than one underlying reason, and if the caller will only ever need to be able to differentiate those reasons after substantial refactoring anyways, then the reasons should collase into `Failed`. If there's either only a single underlying failure reason possible, or only errors arising out of the function body possible, then I've left error handling alone. In the process I've refactored most request-handler-level error mappings to explicitly map `Failed` to `Internal`, rather than having a catch-all mapping for all unhandled errors, to make it easier to remember to add request-level error representations when adding app-level error cases. This also includes helper traits for `Error` and `Result`, to make constructing `Failed` (and errors that include `Failed` as an alternative) easier to do, and some constants for the recurring error messages related to transaction demarcation. I'm not completely happy with the repetitive nature of those error cases, but this is the best I've arrived at so far. As errors are no longer expected to be convertible up the call stack, the `NotFound` and `Duplicate` helper traits for database errors had to change a bit. Those previously assumed that they would be used in the context of an error type implementing `From<sqlx::Error>` (or from another error type with similar characteristics), and that's not the case any more. The resulting idiom for converting a missing value into a domain error is `foo.await.optional().fail(MESSAGE)?.ok_or(DOMAIN ERROR)?`, which is rather clunky, but I've opted not to go further with it. The `Duplicate` helper is just plain gone, as it's not easily generalizable in this structure and using `match` is more tractable for me. Finally, I've changed the convention for error messages from `all lowercase messages in whatever tense i feel like at the moment` to `Sentence-case messages in the past tense`, frequently starting with `Failed to` and a short summary of the task at hand. This, as above, makes error message capitalization between Pilcrow's own messages and messages coming from other libraries/the Rust stdlib much more coherent and less jarring to read.
* De minimis "send me a notification" implementation.Owen Jacobson2025-11-08
| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | When a user clicks "send a test notification," Pilcrow delivers a push message (with a fixed payload) to all active subscriptions. The included client then displays this as a notification, using browser APIs to do so. This lets us verify that push notification works, end to end - and it appears to. The API endpoint for sending a test notification is not documented. I didn't feel it prudent to extensively document an endpoint that is intended to be temporary and whose side effects are very much subject to change. However, for posterity, the endpoint is POST /api/push/ping {} and the push message payload is ping Subscriptions with permanent delivery failures are nuked when we encounter them. Subscriptions with temporary failures cause the `ping` endpoint to return an internal server error, and are not retried. We'll likely want retry logic - including retry logic to handle server restarts - for any more serious use, but for a smoke test, giving up immediately is fine. To make the push implementation testable, `App` is now generic over it. Tests use a dummy implementation that stores sent messages in memory. This has some significant limitations, documented in the test suite, but it beats sending real notifications to nowhere in tests.
* Use PKCS8 PEM, not raw SEC1 bytes, to store VAPID keys.Owen Jacobson2025-10-28
| | | | | | The `web-push` crate's VAPID signing support requires a private key. The `p256` crate is more than capable of generating one, but the easiest way to get a key from a `p256::ecdsa::SigningKey` to a `web_push::PartialVapidSignature` is via PKCS #8 PEM, not via the bytes. Since we'll need it in that form anyways, store it that way, so that we don't have to decode it using `p256`, re-encode to PEM, then decode to `PartialVapidSignature`. The migration in this commit invalidates existing VAPID keys. We could include support for re-encoding them on read, but there's little point: this code is still in flux anyways, and only development deployments exist. By the time this is final, the schema will have settled.
* Merge remote-tracking branch 'codeberg/main' into push-notifyOwen Jacobson2025-10-28
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| * Make `Boot` a freestanding app type, rather than a view of ↵Owen Jacobson2025-10-28
| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | `crate::app::App`'s internals. In the course of working on web push, I determined that we probably need to make `App` generic over the web push client we're using, so that tests can use a dummy client while the real app uses a client created at startup and maintained over the life of the program's execution. The most direct implementation of that is to render App as `App<P>`, where the parameter is occupied by the specific web push client type in use. However, doing this requires refactoring at _every_ site that mentions `App`, including every handler, even though the vast majority of those sites will not be concerned with web push. I reviewed a few options with @wlonk: * Accept the type parameter and apply it everywhere, as the cost of supporting web push. * Hard-code the use of a specific web push client. * Insulate handlers &c from `App` via provider traits, mimicing what we do for repository provider traits today. * Treat each app type as a freestanding state in its own right, so that only push-related components need to consider push clients (as far as is feasible). This is a prototype towards that last point, using a simple app component (boot) as a testbed. `FromRef` allows handlers that take a `Boot` to be used in routes that provide an `App`, so this is a contained change. However, the structure of `FromRef` prevents `Boot` from carrying any lifetime narrower than `'static`, so it now holds clones of the state fields it acquires from App, instead of references. This is fine - that's just a database pool, and sqlx's pool type is designed to be shared via cloning. From <https://docs.rs/sqlx/latest/sqlx/struct.Pool.html>: > Cloning Pool is cheap as it is simply a reference-counted handle to the inner pool state.
* | Generate, store, and deliver a VAPID key.Owen Jacobson2025-08-30
|/ | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | VAPID is used to authenticate applications to push brokers, as part of the [Web Push] specification. It's notionally optional, but we believe [Apple requires it][apple], and in any case making it impossible to use subscription URLs without the corresponding private key available, and thus harder to impersonate the server, seems like a good security practice regardless. [Web Push]: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Push_API [apple]: https://developer.apple.com/documentation/usernotifications/sending-web-push-notifications-in-web-apps-and-browsers There are several implementations of VAPID for Rust: * [web_push](https://docs.rs/web-push/latest/web_push/) includes an implementation of VAPID but requires callers to provision their own keys. We will likely use this crate for Web Push fulfilment, but we cannot use it for key generation. * [vapid](https://docs.rs/vapid/latest/vapid/) includes an implementation of VAPID key generation. It delegates to `openssl` to handle cryptographic operations. * [p256](https://docs.rs/p256/latest/p256/) implements NIST P-256 in Rust. It's maintained by the RustCrypto team, though as of this writing it is largely written by a single contributor. It isn't specifically designed for use with VAPID. I opted to use p256 for this, as I believe the RustCrypto team are the most likely to produce a correct and secure implementation, and because openssl has consistently left a bad taste in my mouth for years. Because it's a general implementation of the algorithm, I expect that it will require more work for us to adapt it for use with VAPID specifically; I'm willing to chance it and we can swap it out for the vapid crate if it sucks. This has left me with one area of uncertainty: I'm not actually sure I'm using the right parts of p256. The choice of `ecdsa::SigningKey` over `p256::SecretKey` is based on [the MDN docs] using phrases like "This value is part of a signing key pair generated by your application server, and usable with elliptic curve digital signature (ECDSA), over the P-256 curve." and on [RFC 8292]'s "The 'k' parameter includes an ECDSA public key in uncompressed form that is encoded using base64url encoding. However, we won't be able to test my implementation until we implement some other key parts of Web Push, which are out of scope of this commit. [the MDN docs]: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/PushSubscription/options [RFC 8292]: https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc8292#section-3.2 Following the design used for storing logins and users, VAPID keys are split into a non-synchronized part (consisting of the private key), whose exposure would allow others to impersonate the Pilcrow server, and a synchronized part (consisting of event coordinates and, notionally, the public key), which is non-sensitive and can be safely shared with any user. However, the public key is derived from the stored private key, rather than being stored directly, to minimize redundancy in the stored data. Following the design used for expiring stale entities, the app checks for and creates, or rotates, its VAPID key using middleware that runs before most API requests. If, at that point, the key is either absent, or more than 30 days old, it is replaced. This imposes a small tax on API request latency, which is used to fund prompt and automatic key rotation without the need for an operator-facing key management interface. VAPID keys are delivered to clients via the event stream, as laid out in `docs/api/events.md`. There are a few reasons for this, but the big one is that changing the VAPID key would immediately invalidate push subscriptions: we throw away the private key, so we wouldn't be able to publish to them any longer. Clients must replace their push subscriptions in order to resume delivery, and doing so promptly when notified that the key has changed will minimize the gap. This design is intended to allow for manual key rotation. The key can be rotated "immedately" by emptying the `vapid_key` and `vapid_signing_key` tables (which destroys the rotated kye); the server will generate a new one before it is needed, and will notify clients that the key has been invalidated. This change includes client support for tracking the current VAPID key. The client doesn't _use_ this information anywhere, yet, but it has it.
* Rename "channel" to "conversation" within the server.Owen Jacobson2025-07-03
| | | | | | I've split this from the schema and API changes because, frankly, it's huge. Annoyingly so. There are no semantic changes in this, it's all symbol changes, but there are a _lot_ of them because the term "channel" leaks all over everything in a service whose primary role is managing messages sent to channels (now, conversations). I found a buggy test while working on this! It's not fixed in this commit, because it felt mean to hide a real change in the middle of this much chaff.
* Remove the snapshot fields from `/api/boot`.Owen Jacobson2025-06-20
| | | | Clients now _must_ construct their state from the event stream; it is no longer possible for them to delegate that work to the server.
* Include historical events in the boot response.Owen Jacobson2025-06-20
| | | | The returned events are all events up to and including the `resume_point` in the same response. If combined with the events from `/api/events?resume_point=x`, using the same `resume_point`, the client will have a complete event history, less any events from histories that have been purged.
* Hoist heartbeat configuration out to the web handler.Owen Jacobson2025-06-20
| | | | | | The _snapshot_ is specifically a snapshot of app state. The purpose of the response struct is to annotate the snapshot with information that isn't from the app, but rather from the request or the web layer. The heartbeat timeout isn't ever used by the app layer in any way; it's used by the Axum handler for `/api/events`, instead. I straight-up missed this when I wrote the original heartbeat changes.
* Heartbeats are part of the event protocol.Owen Jacobson2025-04-08
| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | A heartbeat is an event that the server synthesizes any time an event stream has been idle for longer than some timeout. They allow clients to detect disconnection and network problems, which would otherwise go unnoticed because event streams are a one-way channel. Most network problems only become clear when the offended party tries to _send_ something, and subscribing to an event stream only sends something during the request phase. Technically, Pilcrow has always sent these, since we started using Axum's SSE support: it defaults to sending a dummy event after 15 seconds (consisting of `":\n\n"`, which is then ignored). I've built Pilcrow's heartbeat support out of that, by customizing the event sent back. The results _mostly_ look like existing events, but there are two key differences: * Heartbeats don't have `id` fields in the event stream. They're synthetic, and they don't participate in either the "resume at" sequence management, or the last-event-id header-based resumption management. * Heartbeats have an `event` but no `type` field in the message body. There are no subtypes. To make it less likely that clients will race with the server on expiring timeouts, heartbeats are sent about five seconds early. In this change, heartbeats are due after 20 seconds, but are sent after 15. If it takes longer than five seconds for a heartbeat to arrive, a client can and should treat that as a network problem and reconnect, but I'd really like to avoid that happening over differences smaller than a second, so I've left a margin. I originally sketched this out in conversation with @wlonk as having each event carry a deadline for the next one. I ultimately opted not to do that for a few reasons. First, Axum makes it hard - the built-in keep-alive support only works with a static event, and cannot make dynamic ones whose payloads might vary (for example if the deadline is variable). Second, it's complex, to no apparent gain, and adds deadline information to _every_ event type. This implementation, instead, sends deadline information as part of boot, as a fixed interval in seconds. Clients are responsible for working out deadlines based on message arrivals. This is fine; heartbeat-based connection management is best effort at the best of times, so a few milliseconds of slop in either direction won't hurt anything. The existing client ignores these events entirely, which is convenient. The new heartbeat event type is defined alongside the main event type, to make it less likely that we'll inadvertently make changes to one but not the other. We can still do so advertently, I just don't want it to be an accident.
* Rename a bunch of straggler references to `login`.Owen Jacobson2025-03-24
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* Rename `login` to `user` throughout the serverOwen Jacobson2025-03-23
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* Rename the `login` module to `user`.Owen Jacobson2025-03-23
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* Resume points are no longer optional.Owen Jacobson2024-10-30
| | | | This is an inconsequential change for actual clients, since "resume from the beginning" was never a preferred mode of operation, and it simplifies some internals. It should also mean we get better query plans where `coalesce(cond, true)` was previously being used.
* Make sure (most) queries avoid table scans.Owen Jacobson2024-10-23
| | | | | | | | | | | | I've exempted inserts (they never scan in the first place), queries on `event_sequence` (at most one row), and the coalesce()s used for event replay (for now; these are obviously a performance risk area and need addressing). Method: ``` find .sqlx -name 'query-*.json' -exec jq -r '"explain query plan " + .query + ";"' {} + > explain.sql ``` Then go query by query through the resulting file.
* Canonicalize login and channel names.Owen Jacobson2024-10-22
| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | Canonicalization does two things: * It prevents duplicate names that differ only by case or only by normalization/encoding sequence; and * It makes certain name-based comparisons "case-insensitive" (generalizing via Unicode's case-folding rules). This change is complicated, as it means that every name now needs to be stored in two forms. Unfortunately, this is _very likely_ a breaking schema change. The migrations in this commit perform a best-effort attempt to canonicalize existing channel or login names, but it's likely any existing channels or logins with non-ASCII characters will not be canonicalize correctly. Since clients look at all channel names and all login names on boot, and since the code in this commit verifies canonicalization when reading from the database, this will effectively make the server un-usuable until any incorrectly-canonicalized values are either manually canonicalized, or removed It might be possible to do better with [the `icu` sqlite3 extension][icu], but (a) I'm not convinced of that and (b) this commit is already huge; adding database extension support would make it far larger. [icu]: https://sqlite.org/src/dir/ext/icu For some references on why it's worth storing usernames this way, see <https://www.b-list.org/weblog/2018/nov/26/case/> and the refernced talk, as well as <https://www.b-list.org/weblog/2018/feb/11/usernames/>. Bennett's treatment of this issue is, to my eye, much more readable than the referenced Unicode technical reports, and I'm inclined to trust his opinion given that he maintains a widely-used, internet-facing user registration library for Django.
* Return a flat message list on boot, not nested lists by channel.Owen Jacobson2024-10-09
| | | | This is a bit easier to compute, and sets us up nicely for pulling message boot out of the `/api/boot` response entirely.
* Provide a view of logins to clients.Owen Jacobson2024-10-09
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* Separate `/api/boot` into its own module.Owen Jacobson2024-10-05