At FP Complete, we're no strangers to running complex web services. But we know from experience that the simplest service to maintain is one someone else is managing for you. A few days ago I described how secure package distribution with stackage-update and stackage-install works, focusing on the client side tooling. Today's blog post is about how we use Amazon S3, Github, and Travis CI to host all of this with (almost) no servers of our own (that caveat explained in the process).

Making executables available

We have two different Haskell tools needed to this hosting: hackage-mirror to copy the raw packages to Hackage, and all-cabal-hashes-tool to populate the raw cabal files with hash/package size information. But we don't want to have to compile this executables every time we call them. Instead, we'd like to simply download and run a precompiled executable.

Like many other Github projects, these two utilize Travis CI to build and test the code every time a commit is pushed. But that's not all; using Travis's deployment capability, they also upload an executable to S3.

Figuring out the details of making this work is a bit tricky, so it's easiest to just look at the .travis.yml file. For the security conscious: the trick is that Travis allows us to encrypt data so that no one but Travis can decrypt it. Then, Travis can decrypt and upload it to S3 for us.

Result: a fully open, transparent process for executable building that can be reviewed by anyone in the community, without allowing private credentials to be leaked. Also, notice how none of our own servers needed to get involved.

Running the executables

We're going to leverage Travis yet again, and use it to run the executables it so politely generated for us. We'll use all-cabal-hashes as our demonstration, though all-cabal-packages works much the same way. We have an update.sh script which downloads and runs our executable, and then commits, signs, and pushes to Github. In order to sign and push, however, we need to have a GPG and SSH key, respectively.

Once again, Travis's encryption capabilities come into play. In the .travis.yml file, we decrypt a tar file containing the GPG and SSH key, put them in the correct location, and also configure Git. Then we call out to the update.sh script. One wrinkle here is that Travis only supports having a single encrypted file per repo, which is why we have to tar together the two different keys, which is a minor annoyance.

As before, we have processes running on completely open, auditable systems. Uploads are being made to providers we don't manage (either Amazon or Github). The only thing kept hidden are the secrets themselves (keys). And if the process ever fails, I get an immediate notification from Travis. So far, that's only happened when I was playing with the build or Hackage was unresponsive.

Running regularly

It wouldn't be very useful if these processes weren't run regularly. This is a perfect place for a cron job. Unfortunately, Travis doesn't yet support cron job, though they seem to be planning it for the future. In the meanwhile, we do have to run this on our own service. Fortunately, it's a simple job that just asks Travis to restart the last build it ran for each repository.

To simplify even further, I run the Travis command line client from inside a Docker container, so that the only host system dependency is Docker itself. The wrapper script is:

#!/bin/bash set -e set -x docker run --rm -v /home/ubuntu/all-cabal-files-internal.sh:/run.sh:ro bilge/travis-cli /run.sh

The script that runs inside the Docker container is the following (token hidden to protect... well, me).

#!/bin/bash set -ex travis login --skip-version-check --org --github-token XXXXXXXXX # Trigger the package mirroring first, since it's used by all-cabal-hashes BUILD=$(travis branches --skip-version-check -r commercialhaskell/all-cabal-packages | grep "^hackage" | awk "{ print \$2 }") BUILDNUM=${BUILD###} echo BUILD=$BUILD echo BUILDNUM=$BUILDNUM travis restart --skip-version-check -r commercialhaskell/all-cabal-packages $BUILDNUM BUILD=$(travis branches --skip-version-check -r commercialhaskell/all-cabal-files | grep "^hackage" | awk "{ print \$2 }") BUILDNUM=${BUILD###} echo BUILD=$BUILD echo BUILDNUM=$BUILDNUM travis restart --skip-version-check -r commercialhaskell/all-cabal-files $BUILDNUM # Put in a bit of a delay to allow the all-cabal-packages job to finish. If # not, no big deal, next job will pick up the change. sleep 30 BUILD=$(travis branches --skip-version-check -r commercialhaskell/all-cabal-hashes | grep "^hackage" | awk "{ print \$2 }") BUILDNUM=${BUILD###} echo BUILD=$BUILD echo BUILDNUM=$BUILDNUM travis restart --skip-version-check -r commercialhaskell/all-cabal-hashes $BUILDNUM

Conclusion

Letting someone else deal with our file storage, file serving, executable building, and update process is a massive time saver. Now our sysadmins can stop dealing with these problems, and start solving complicated problems. The fact that everyone can inspect, learn from, and understand what our services are doing is another advantage. I encourage others to try out these kinds of deployments whenever possible.

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