It's a common, and distressing, pattern to have factories in tests that call out to a library like Faker to "randomize" the returned object. So you might see something like this:

User.create({
    id: uuid(),
    email: faker.random.email(),
    first_name: faker.random.firstName(),
    last_name: faker.random.lastName(),
    address: faker.random.address(),
});

package = Package.create({
    width: faker.math.range(100),
    height: faker.math.range(200),
    length: faker.math.range(300),
})

This is a bad practice and it's distressing to see it in such widespread use. I want to explain some reasons why it's bad.

The corpus is not large enough to avoid uniqueness failures

Let's say you write a test that creates two different users, and for whatever reason, the test fails if the users have the same name (due to a database constraint failure, write to same map key, array having 1 value instead of 2, &c). Faker has about three thousand different possible values for a first name. This means that every 3000th run on average, the randomly chosen names will collide, and your test will fail. In a CI environment or on a medium size team, it's easy to run the tests 3000 times in a week. Alternatively, if the same error exists in ten tests, it will emerge on average once every 300 runs.

The onus on catching failures falls on your team

Because the error only appears once in every 3000 test runs, the odds are you haven't fully or partially probed the space of possible test values when you submit your code and tests for review. This means that the other members of your team will be the ones who run into the error caused by your tests. They might lack the context necessary to effectively debug the problem. This is a very frustrating experience for your teammates.

It's hard to reproduce failures

If you don't have enough logging to see the problem on the first failure, it's going to be difficult to track down a failure that appears only once every 3,000 test runs. Run the test ten or even fifty times in a loop and it still won't appear.

An environment where tests randomly fail for unknown reasons is corrosive to build stability. It encourages people to just hit the "Rebuild" button and hope for a pass on the next try. Eventually this attitude will mask real problems with the build. If your test suite takes a long time to run (upwards of three minutes) it can be demoralizing to push the deploy or rebase button and watch your tests fail for an unrelated reason.

It's a large library (and growing)

It's common for me to write Node.js tests and have an entire test file with 50 or 100 tests exit in about 10 milliseconds.

By definition a "fixture" library needs to load a lot of fake data. In 2015 it took about 60 milliseconds to import faker. It now takes about 300 milliseconds:

var a = Date.now()
require('faker');
console.log(Date.now() - a);

$ node faker-testing/index.js
303

You can hack around this by only importing the locale you need, but I've never seen anyone do this in practice.

What you need instead

So faker is a bad idea. What should you use? It depends on your use case.

• Unique random identifiers. If you need a random unique identifier, just use a uuid generator directly. If you create 103 trillion objects in a given test, the odds of a uuid collision are still only one in a billion, so the odds of a collision are much lower than using the faker library. Alternatively, you can use an incrementing integer each time you call your factory, so you get "Person 0", "Person 1", "Person 2", etc.

• A fuzzer, or QuickCheck. Faker has tools for randomizing values within some input space, say a package width that varies between 0 and 100. The problem is that the default set up is to only exhaust one of those values each time you run the test, so you're barely covering the input space.

  What you really want is a fuzzer, that will generate a ton of random values within a set of parameters, and test a significant percentage of them each time the test runs. This gives a better guarantee that there are no errors. Alternatively, if there are known edge cases, you can add explicit tests for those edge cases (negative, 0, one, seven, max, or whatever). Tools like Haskell's QuickCheck or afl-fuzz make it easy to add this type of testing to your test suite.

If you want random human-looking data I suggest adding it yourself and using some scheme that makes sense for your company. For example, users named Alice and Bob are always friends that complete actions successfully, and Eve always makes errors. Riders with Android phones always want to get picked up in Golden Gate Park and taken to the Mission; riders with iPhones want to get picked up in the Tenderloin and taken to Russian Hill (or something). This scheme will provide more semantic value, and easily pinpoint errors (a "Bob" error means we should have submitted something successfully but failed to, for example).

That's all; happy testing, and may your tests never be flaky!

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There are a number of Unix commands that manipulate something about the environment or arguments in some way before starting a subcommand. For example:

• xargs reads arguments from standard input and appends them to the end of the command.

• chpst changes the process state before calling the resulting command.

• envdir manipulates the process environment, loading variables from a directory, before starting a subcommand

Go is a popular language for writing tools that shell out to a subprocess, for example aws-vault or chamber, both of which have exec options for initializing environment variables and then calling your subcommand.

Unfortunately there are a number of ways that you can make mistakes when proxying to a subcommand, especially one where the end user is specifying the subcommand to run, and you can't determine anything about it ahead of time. I would like to list some of them here.

First, create the subcommand.

cmd := exec.Command("mybinary", "arg1", "-flag")
// All of our setup work will go here
if err := cmd.Run(); err != nil {
    log.Fatal(err)
}

Standard Output/Input/Error

You probably want to proxy through the subcommand's standard output and standard error to the parent terminal. Just reassign stdout/stderr to point at the parent command. Obviously, you can redirect these later.

cmd.Stdout = os.Stdout
cmd.Stderr = os.Stderr
// If you need
cmd.Stdin = os.Stdin

Environment Variables

By default the subcommand gets all of the environment variables that belong to the Go process. But if you reassign cmd.Env it will only get the variables you provide, so you have to be careful with your implementation.

cmd.Env = []string{"TZ=UTC", "MYVAR=myval"}

Signals

If someone sends a signal to the parent process, you probably want to forward it through to the child. This gets tricky because you can receive multiple signals, that all should be sent to the client and handled appropriately.

You also can't send signals until you start the process, so you need to use a goroutine to handle them. I've copied this code from aws-vault, with some modifications.

if err := cmd.Start(); err != nil {
    log.Fatal(err) // Command not found on PATH, not executable, &c.
}
// wait for the command to finish
waitCh := make(chan error, 1)
go func() {
    waitCh <- cmd.Wait()
    close(waitCh)
}()
sigChan := make(chan os.Signal, 1)
signal.Notify(sigChan)

// You need a for loop to handle multiple signals
for {
    select {
    case sig := <-sigChan:
        if err := cmd.Process.Signal(sig); err != nil {
            // Not clear how we can hit this, but probably not
            // worth terminating the child.
            log.Print("error sending signal", sig, err)
        }
    case err := <-waitCh:
        // Subprocess exited. Get the return code, if we can
        var waitStatus syscall.WaitStatus
        if exitError, ok := err.(*exec.ExitError); ok {
            waitStatus = exitError.Sys().(syscall.WaitStatus)
            os.Exit(waitStatus.ExitStatus())
        }
        if err != nil {
            log.Fatal(err)
        }
        return
    }
}

Just Use Exec

The above code block is quite complicated. If all you want to do is start a subcommand and then exit the process, you can avoid all of the above logic by calling exec. Unix has a notion of parent and children processes - when you start a process with cmd.Run, it becomes a child process. exec is a special system call that sees the child process become the parent. Consider the following program:

cmd := exec.Command("sleep", "3600")
if err := cmd.Run(); err != nil {
    log.Fatal(err)
}
fmt.Println("terminated")

If I run it, the process tree will look something like this:

 | |   \-+= 06167 kevin -zsh
 | |     \-+= 09471 kevin go-sleep-command-proxy
 | |       \--- 09472 kevin sleep 3600

If I run exec, the sleep command will replace the Go command with the sleep command. In Go, this looks something like this:

 | |   \-+= 06167 kevin -zsh
 | |     \--= 09862 kevin sleep 3600

This is really useful for us, because:

• We don't need to proxy through signals or stdout/stderr anymore! Those are automatically handled for us.

• The return code of the exec'd process becomes the return code of the program.

• We don't have to use memory running the Go program.

Another reason to use exec: even if you get the proxying code perfectly right, proxying commands (as we did above) can have errors. The Go process can't handle SIGKILL, so there's a chance that someone will send SIGKILL to the Go process and then the subprocess will be "orphaned." The subprocess will be reattached to PID 1, which makes it tougher to collect.

I should note: Syscalls can vary from operating system to operating system, so you should be careful that the arguments you pass to syscall.Exec make sense for the operating system you're using. Rob Pike and Ian Lance Taylor also think it's a bad idea.

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Bazel is a build system that was recently open sourced by Google. Bazel operates on configuration files - a WORKSPACE file for your entire project, and then per-directory BUILD.bazel files. These declare all of the dependencies for your project, using a language called Skylark. There are a number of Skylark rules for things like downloading and caching HTTP archives, and language-specific rules.

This can be a pain to set up for a new project, but the advantage is you get builds that are perfectly hermetic. In addition, if your project has a lot of artifacts, Bazel has useful tools for caching those artifacts, and builds a dependency graph that makes it easy to see when things change. For example, if you compile Javascript from Typescript, you can cache the compiled Javascript. If the Typescript source file changes, Bazel knows that only the file that changed needs to be regenerated.

Anyway there are some gotchas about running Bazel on Travis CI that I wanted to cover, and when I was looking at instructions they weren't great.

1) Install Bazel

The official instructions ask you to add the Bazel apt repository, and then install from there. You can shave a few seconds by only updating that repository, instead of all of them.

echo "deb [arch=amd64] http://storage.googleapis.com/bazel-apt stable jdk1.8" | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/bazel.list
curl --silent https://bazel.build/bazel-release.pub.gpg | sudo apt-key add -
sudo apt-get update -o Dir::Etc::sourcelist="sources.list.d/bazel.list" \
    -o Dir::Etc::sourceparts="-" \
    -o APT::Get::List-Cleanup="0"
sudo apt-get install openjdk-8-jdk bazel

You can shave a few more seconds by just getting and installing the deb directly, though this requires you to manually update the version number when Bazel releases a new version. (This is in a Makefile, you'll need to change the syntax for Bash or a travis.yml file).

BAZEL_VERSION := "0.7.0"
BAZEL_DEB := "bazel_$(BAZEL_VERSION)_amd64.deb"

curl --silent --output /tmp/$(BAZEL_DEB) "https://storage.googleapis.com/bazel-apt/pool/jdk1.8/b/bazel/$(BAZEL_DEB)"
sudo dpkg --force-all -i /tmp/$(BAZEL_DEB)

2) Run Tests

Bazel ships with a ton of flags but these are probably the ones you want to know about/use:

• --batch: Run in batch mode, as opposed to client-server mode.

• --noshow_progress / --noshow_loading_progress: Travis pretends to be a TTY so it can show colors, but this causes Bazel to dump a whole bunch of progress messages to the screen. It would be nice if you could say "I can handle ANSI escape sequences relating to colors, but not screen redraws" but you only get the binary "I'm a TTY" / "I'm not", which is unfortunate. Anyway these options turn off the "show progress" log spam.

• --test_output=errors: By default Bazel logs test failures to a log file. This option will print them to the screen instead.

• --features: Enable features specific to a test runner. In particular for Go you may want the --features=race rule to run tests with the race detector enabled.

3) Cache Results

Bazel is much faster when it can load the intermediate results from a cache; on one library I maintain, tests run in 13 seconds (versus 47 seconds) when they are run with a full cache.

However, the Bazel caches are enormous. Caches for Go tests include the Go binary and source tree, which runs about 95MB alone. Add on other artifacts (including the Java JDK's used to run Bazel) and it's common to see over 200MB. If you are uploading or downloading caches from somewhere like S3, this can be a really slow operation. Also, it's difficult to remove large items from Bazel's cache without removing everything; the file structure makes the cache a little tough to remove parts of.

In particular, Travis's cache does go to S3, which means it skips the local caching proxies Travis sets up for e.g. apt and npm. Travis times out the cache download after 3 minutes, and Bazel quits if the cache is corrupt. In my experience Travis will not complete a 200MB cache download in 3 minutes, so your builds will fail.

That's it

For now it's probably best to eat the cold cache startup time. That's really unfortunate though; I hope we can find a better solution in the future. One way may be for Travis to run a local "remote cache", which responds to the WebDAV protocol. This would allow closer caching of Bazel objects.

It would also be nice if Travis had a "language: bazel" mode, which would come with the right version of Bazel installed for you.

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It's easier than you think to make a software package installable via Homebrew. If you depend on a very specific version of a software package (say, Postgres 9.5.3 with readline support), I highly recommend creating a Homebrew repository and publishing recipes to it. Then your team can install and update packages as easily as:

brew tap mycompany/packages
brew install mycompany/packages/postgresql

You can use the existing formulas as a jumping off point, and modify as you see fit. (Obviously this won't work for Linux folks on your team, however in my experience people running Linux in a Mac software shop have more experience building dependencies on their own).

Anyway, I wanted to describe how to install Go binaries via Homebrew. One way to do this is to compile binaries, upload them to Github releases, and install from there. However, the Homebrew core team requires that packages are buildable from the source code. (This helps check that a binary wasn't tampered with, and avoids compatibility problems with e.g. 32 bit and 64 bit systems).

If you vendor dependencies, and check in the vendor folder to Github, installation is super easy.

# Classname should match the name of the installed package.
class Hostsfile < Formula
  desc "CLI for manipulating /etc/hosts files"
  homepage "https://github.com/kevinburke/hostsfile"

  # Source code archive. Each tagged release will have one
  url "https://github.com/kevinburke/hostsfile/archive/1.2.tar.gz"
  sha256 "cc1f3c1cb505536044cbe01f44ad7da997e6a3928fac1f64590ef69d73da8acd"
  head "https://github.com/kevinburke/hostsfile"

  depends_on "go" => :build

  def install
    ENV["GOPATH"] = buildpath

    bin_path = buildpath/"src/github.com/kevinburke/hostsfile"
    # Copy all files from their current location (GOPATH root)
    # to $GOPATH/src/github.com/kevinburke/hostsfile
    bin_path.install Dir["*"]
    cd bin_path do
      # Install the compiled binary into Homebrew's `bin` - a pre-existing
      # global variable
      system "go", "build", "-o", bin/"hostsfile", "."
    end
  end

  # Homebrew requires tests.
  test do
    # "2>&1" redirects standard error to stdout. The "2" at the end means "the
    # exit code should be 2".
    assert_match "hostsfile version 1.2", shell_output("#{bin}/hostsfile version 2>&1", 2)
  end
end

Basically, download some source code, move it to $GOPATH/src/path/to/binary, build it, and put the compiled binary in $(brew --prefix)/bin.

If you don't vendor dependencies, the story gets a little more complicated because you need to download a version of all of your dependencies. Say for example I had one dependency in my project, I would add a go_resource line for each dependency, and then call stage_deps to download/install all of them in the correct places.

require "language/go"

# Classname should match the name of the installed package.
class Hostsfile < Formula
  desc "CLI for manipulating /etc/hosts files"
  homepage "https://github.com/kevinburke/hostsfile"

  # Source code archive. Each tagged release will have one
  url "https://github.com/kevinburke/hostsfile/archive/1.2.tar.gz"
  sha256 "cc1f3c1cb505536044cbe01f44ad7da997e6a3928fac1f64590ef69d73da8acd"
  head "https://github.com/kevinburke/hostsfile"

  go_resource "github.com/mattn/go-colorable" do
    url "https://github.com/mattn/go-colorable.git",
        :revision => "40e4aedc8fabf8c23e040057540867186712faa5"
  end


  depends_on "go" => :build

  def install
    ENV["GOPATH"] = buildpath


    bin_path = buildpath/"src/github.com/kevinburke/hostsfile"
    # Copy all files from their current location (GOPATH root)
    # to $GOPATH/src/github.com/kevinburke/hostsfile
    bin_path.install Dir["*"]

    # Stage dependencies. This requires the "require language/go" line above
    Language::Go.stage_deps resources, buildpath/"src"
    cd bin_path do
      # Install the compiled binary into Homebrew's `bin` - a pre-existing
      # global variable
      system "go", "build", "-o", bin/"hostsfile", "."
    end
  end

  # Homebrew requires tests.
  test do
    # "2>&1" redirects standard error to stdout. The "2" at the end means "the
    # exit code should be 2".
    assert_match "hostsfile version 1.2", shell_output("#{bin}/hostsfile version 2>&1", 2)
  end
end

And that's it! You can test your new package by creating a symlink from /usr/local/Homebrew/Library/Taps/homebrew to wherever you keep your homebrew-core checkout:

ln -s ~/code/homebrew-core /usr/local/Homebrew/Library/Taps/homebrew/homebrew-core

Then you can just use brew install commands and they'll work just as you expect.

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Node string encoding is all over the place. Let's try to straighten out how it works.

First, some very basics about string encoding. A string is a series of bytes. A byte is 8 bits, each of which can be 0 or 1, so a byte can have 2⁸ or 256 different values. Encoding is the process of squashing the graphics you see on screen, say, 世 - into actual bytes. There are over a million possible Unicode characters - think about all of the different languages and emoji and symbols on the planet.

You could easily represent all of the characters in the Unicode set with an encoding that says simply "assign one number, 4 bytes (or 32 bits) long, for each character in the Unicode set." One 32-bit combo for each character means you can have 4 billion distinct characters. But this would be really inefficient for most documents. For example, the English Bible or dictionary or people's email folders are mostly the characters a-z, A-Z, 0-9, and punctuation. It would be inefficient to waste 4 bytes on every "a" in the document - we want a way to represent it more efficiently.

The most common encoding is UTF-8. The main advantage of UTF-8 is that it needs a single byte (instead of four) to encode Unicode characters 0-127 - the so-called ASCII set, which includes the ones I listed above. Less common characters are represented with two bytes, and even less common characters with three bytes, and so on.

Because Javascript was invented twenty years ago in the space of ten days, it uses an encoding that uses two bytes to store each character, which translates roughly to an encoding called UCS-2, or another one called UTF-16. The letter 'a' is Unicode code point 97, so stored in a Javascript string, the first byte of a UTF-16 code point would be 97 and the second byte would be 0. The euro symbol (€) is Unicode code point 8364, so the first byte would be 172 and the second byte would be 32. (The relationship between them: 8364 = (32 << 8) + 172).

That only gets you Unicode code points 0 through (256*256 = ) 65536, though, so: if the first two-byte character is between 55296 and 56319, it's a surrogate, and you have to read the second two-byte character to figure out what Unicode code point it represents. Javascript will handle this multi-character read for you if you use the new codePointAt operator, which can return all Unicode code points, up to 1.1 million. The old charCodeAt operator only reads one character at a time (between 0 and 65536) and you'll have to read/decode the second one yourself.

Where this gets complicated

Because everything else in the world is moving to UTF-8, Node is also trying to move to UTF-8. This gets confusing because Node sometimes asks you to choose which encoding you want, in places where you wouldn't really expect it to ask.

Frequently, you want to convert from a UTF-16 encoded Javascript string to UTF-8 bytes in some form, whether a Buffer or a Uint8Array. Unfortunately Node doesn't offer easy API's to do that; it buries the conversion logic in C++ code, which eventually calls out to the V8 binary to handle it.

Buffers

Node offers a Buffer type, where a Buffer is an array of bytes, and an API, Buffer.from(string, encoding). encoding defaults to UTF-8. So far, so good! Unfortunately, sometimes encoding refers to the encoding of string, and sometimes it refers to the encoding of the bytes in the Buffer.

Buffer.from('7468697320697320612074c3a97374', 'hex') will decode the input as a series of hex characters, and store the bytes corresponding to each 2-digit hex character in the Buffer. But in var a = 'tést'; Buffer.from(a, 'utf8'); the 'utf8' refers to how the bytes will be stored in the resulting Buffer. Remember, strings are always two bytes per character, so declaring they are 'utf8' doesn't make sense.

Similarly, the encoding parameter in buf.toString(encoding) does not refer to the encoding of the output string - it refers to the encoding of the data in the buffer. Unless of course you specify hex or base64, in which case it does refer to the encoding of the output string. Got it?

HTTP

Incoming HTTP requests are often encoded using UTF-8. Node will give you data as a Buffer via the HTTP request's .on('data') event handler, which can be decoded using the content-type from the HTTP headers. In Express, this is handled in the body-parser module, which defers to the iconv-lite module for the actual encoding and decoding.

But if you expect e.g. a JSON or XML input, you will probably eventually want to turn that Buffer into a string - see the JSON section below.

When writing string data as an HTTP response, Node will wait until the last possible minute to convert that string into a Buffer that can be written to the socket. This leads to odd behaviors like the net library needing to know what encoding to use for a string you pass to it.

JSON

JSON.parse operates on a string and returns a JSON object, which may be a string or contain strings. JSON.parse and JSON.stringify don't do anything with the string encoding - if you pass in a garbage string, you get a garbage string back out.

So you need to depend on something else to determine the character encoding, before you pass a string to JSON.parse. Usually this will be your HTTP middleware; you have to trust (or verify) that it handles character sets correctly, before creating UTF-8 strings.

Files on disk

Node source files are expected to be encoded with UTF-8. That means you can encode UTF-8 source characters in a string, like this:

var x = "¢"

Where the cent character is the UTF-8 encoded byte sequence "\xc2\xa2". When Node starts and you try to reference x in your program, it will be re-encoded as a UTF-16 string. If you type the literal characters:

var x = "\xc2\xa2";

This will be turned into the UTF-16 string "\xc2\x00\xa2\x00". So be careful to mind your inputs and outputs.

Conclusion

Encoding in Node is extremely confusing, and difficult to get right. It helps, though, when you realize that Javascript string types will always be encoded as UTF-16, and most of the other places strings in RAM interact with sockets, files, or byte arrays, the string gets re-encoded as UTF-8.

This is all massively inefficient, of course. Most strings are representable as UTF-8, and using two bytes to represent their characters means you are using more memory than you need to, as well as paying an O(n) tax to re-encode the string any time you encounter a HTTP or filesystem boundary.

There's nothing stopping us from packing UTF-8 bytes into a UTF-16 string: to use each of the two bytes to store one UTF-8 character. We would need custom encoders and decoders, but it's possible. And it would avoid the need to re-encode the string at any system boundary.

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You should write your next web server in Go. Yes, you! Compared with Ruby, PHP, Python, or Javascript, you're going to get great memory and latency performance, and libraries that do what you expect.

The standard library can be a bit lacking though, if you are used to developing with a tool like Rails. I found myself adding the same helpers to every web project that I started in Go, so I compiled those tools into a starter pack. Most of the code is thin wrappers around the standard library, and any/all of it can be ripped out. I wanted to go over some of the tools in the starter pack.

Serving Static Assets

I compile static assets into the binary. This way you don't need to worry about copying static assets to your deployment server, passing in the relative path from the working directory to the static asset directory, or ensuring that you have the right version of the static assets for the right version of the binary.

A make target runs go-bindata, which compiles everything in the static directory and the templates directory into a single Go file. When a request comes in for static assets, we find the right one and serve it:

data, err := assets.Asset(strings.TrimPrefix(r.URL.Path, "/"))
if err != nil {
    rest.NotFound(w, r)
    return
}
http.ServeContent(w, r, r.URL.Path, s.modTime, bytes.NewReader(data))

Tests ensure that the static files on disk and the Go assets are up to date.

Routing

The Go http router only offers exact match, or the ability to route a directory, e.g. http.Handle("/static/", staticHandler()). I use a http.Handler that takes a regular expression as the first argument, instead of a string, and lets you specify which methods you want to handle.

r := new(handlers.Regexp) // github.com/kevinburke/handlers
r.HandleFunc(regexp.MustCompile("^/$"), []string{"GET"}, func(w http.ResponseWriter, r *http.Request) {
    w.Header().Set("Content-Type", "text/html; charset=utf-8")
    io.WriteString(w, "<html><body><h1>Hello World</h1></body></html>")
})

You can use regexp.FindStringSubmatch to pull parameters out of the URL, or replace this with your own routing framework.

HTTP/2 Server Push

"We shall go south," Paul said.

"Even if I say we shall turn back to the north when this day is over?" Stilgar said. "We shall go south," Paul repeated.

r.HandleFunc(regexp.MustCompile(`^/$`), []string{"GET"}, func(w http.ResponseWriter, r *http.Request) {
    if pusher, ok := w.(http.Pusher); ok {
        pusher.Push("/static/style.css", nil)
    }
    // Render the homepage HTML
})

It's really, really easy to do server push in Go, and the idea of pushing resources your clients are about to ask for is so exciting that I wanted to use it even if the benefits aren't going to be that large for your project.

Server push requires that you terminate TLS in your Go server. Run make generate_cert to generate a self-signed certificate for use locally. Use autocert.NewListener() for one-line certificate provisioning in production.

If you can't terminate TLS (say you are running on App Engine Flex or Heroku), the starter pack falls back to sending a preload Link header.

Logging

Being able to see details about every incoming request and response helps with debugging and is rarely a performance bottleneck on a domain that's being browsed by humans. In particular it's useful to see the user agent, the status code, the request ID (for correlating with downstream services), and any username used for HTTP basic authentication.

INFO[07:52:24.810-07:00] method=GET path=/ time=0 bytes=468 status=200
remote_addr=[::1]:50170 host=localhost:7065 user_agent=HTTPie/1.0.0-dev
request_id=a8cf0a8c-4f30-4b01-a49d-396611b3ca15

I use a logging middleware for this but you are welcome to rip it out and use your own.

Flash Messages

You'll probably want to show error and success messages to your end users. Again this is trying to take the simplest possible approach - a flash message is set by encrypting a string and setting the result as a cookie. Retrieving the message deletes the cookie.

func FlashSuccess(w http.ResponseWriter, msg string, key *[32]byte) {
	c := &http.Cookie{
		Name:     "flash-success",
		Path:     "/",
		Value:    opaque(msg, key),
		HttpOnly: true,
	}
	http.SetCookie(w, c)
}

We use the secretbox library to encrypt and decrypt cookies using a secret key - you can use the same to encrypt session ID's or other data in a tamper-safe way.

Loading Configuration

You will probably need to configure the server somehow. I prefer loading configuration from a YAML file to the command line or to environment variables, because it's more difficult to accidentally leak secrets from YAML to e.g. Sentry (as you can with environment variables), and your secrets can't be read from /proc/<pid>/env by other users.

main.go walks you through loading a YAML file and using it to configure the server.

Release Binaries

Run make release version=0.x.y to increment the server's Version, cross compile binaries for Windows, Mac, and Linux, and push them to the releases page on Github. You'll want to set a GITHUB_TOKEN in the environment with permission to push new releases to your project, and you'll probably need to change the username in your version of the Makefile.

Conclusion

It's not too difficult to get a lot of the core functionality of a larger framework in a different language, with a lot better performance and a more understandable set of libraries. It should be pretty easy to rip any of these parts out; you should deploy this by copying the files into your own project and modifying as you see fit.

I hope the starter pack is useful and I hope you choose Go for your next web development project!

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You may have seen this on New Year's Eve:

Another leap second, another slew of outages. Handling time correctly is hard!https://t.co/kJepOfsKkv pic.twitter.com/Fwz2Xtpzkd

— Dan Luu (@danluu) January 1, 2017

I'd heard a little about this problem, but I didn't understand how it broke code, and what to do about it. So here is an explainer.

Background

Earlier this year, the International Earth Rotation and Reference Systems Service decided to add an additional second to the year. This is due to the fact that the Earth's day-to-day rotation does not perfectly line up with a 86400 second day.

So when the clock hit 23:59:59 on New Year's Eve, it usually ticks over to 00:00:00, but this year, repeated the second 23:59:59. So if you had measurement code that looked like:

a := time.Now() // Dec 31 2016 23:59:59 and 800ms
// While this operation is in progress, the leap second starts
doSomeExpensiveOperation()
duration := time.Since(a) // Taken at Dec 31 2016 23:59:59 (#2!) and 100ms
fmt.Println(duration)

We usually assume in our code that time can't go backwards, but the duration there is -700ms! This can cause big problems if you have code that always expects nonnegative time durations. In particular code that accepts timeouts might panic or immediately error if it gets a negative value. Cloudflare passed a negative duration to rand.Int63n, which crashed some of their servers.

But this is only a problem on leap seconds, which occur once a year at most. That's not good, but I can handle one problem a year. That would be nice, but unfortunately time on your servers can jump around quite a bit. An individual server might get a few seconds ahead or behind the rest of your servers. When it gets the correct time from the NTP server, the time on the server might jump forward or backward a few seconds. If you run any number of servers you are bound to hit this problem sooner or later.

Ok, how do I deal with it?

Good question! The Linux community implemented CLOCK_MONOTONIC as an option to clock_gettime to solve this problem. CLOCK_MONOTONIC returns an integer number of nanoseconds that only ever increases. You can use this to get more accurate (and always nonnegative) deltas than getting the system time twice and subtracting the samples.

You'll have to check whether your programming language uses CLOCK_MONOTONIC for implementing calls to get the system time. Many languages don't use it for the simple "what time is it" call, because it returns you time from a random starting point, not the epoch.

So you can't really translate between a CLOCK_MONOTONIC value and any given human date; it's only useful when you take multiple samples and compare them.

In particular

The Go standard library does not use CLOCK_MONOTONIC for calls to time.Now(). Go has a function that implements CLOCK_MONOTONIC, but it's not a public part of the standard library. You can access it via the monotime library - replace your calls to time.Now() with monotime.Now(). Note you will get back a uint64 that only makes sense if you call monotime.Now() again a little while later (on the same machine) and subtract it from the first value you got.

import "time"
import "github.com/aristanetworks/goarista/monotime"
func main() {
    a := monotime.Now()
    someExpensiveOperation()
    b := monotime.Now()
    // b - a will *always* be greater than 0
    fmt.Println(time.Duration(b - a))
}

Porting code errata

I ported Logrole (a Twilio log viewer) to implement monotonic time. In the past it was really easy to call t := time.Now() and then, later, somewhere else in the code, call diff := time.Since(t) to get a Duration. This let you both use t as a wall clock time, and get an elapsed amount of time since t, at some unspecified point later in the codebase and in time. With CLOCK_MONOTONIC you have to separate these two use cases; you can get a delta or you can get a Time but you can't get both.

The patch was pretty messy and an indication of the problems you might have in your own codebase.

Another problem to watch out for is a uint64 underflow. If you have code like this:

if since := time.Since(aDeadline); since > 0 {
    return nil, errors.New("deadline exceeded")
}

You might port it to something like:

now := monotime.Now()
deadline := now + uint64(500*time.Millisecond)
someExpensiveOperation()
if monotime.Now() - deadline > 0 {
    return nil, errors.New("deadline exceeded")
}

The problem here is you are subtracting uint64 values and if now is under the deadline, you'll underflow and get a very large uint64 value (which is greater than 0), so you'll always execute the if condition. Instead you need to avoid the subraction as well and use

if monotime.Now() > deadline {

instead.

Conclusion

It is hard to get this right, but it's probably a good practice to separate out wall clock time values from time values used for deltas and timeouts. If you don't do this from the start though you are going to run into problems. It would be nice if this was better supported in your language's standard library; ideally you'd be forced to figure out which use case you needed a time value for, and use it for that.

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