Yes

Mac@programming.dev to Programmer Humor@programming.dev – 774 points –
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my website's backend is made with bash, it calls make for every request and it probably has hundreds of remote arbitrary code execution bugs that will get me pwned someday, it's great

edit: to clarify, it uses a rust program i made to expose the bash scripts as http endpoints, i'm not crazy enough to implement http in bash

it behaves like a static file server, but if a file has the others-execute permission bit set it executes the file instead of reading it

it's surprisingly nice for prototyping since you can just write a cli program and it's automatically available over http too

For my own sanity, I choose to believe you're lying

who hurt you?

i thought it was neat how php lets you write your website's logic with the same directory tree pattern that clients consume it from, but i didn't want to learn php so i made my own, worse version

That’s a pretty reasonable reaction to the proposition of learning PHP.

I pity the hacker who ends up in your system

I've taken some precautions, it's running in a container as an unprivileged user and the only writable mount is the directory where make writes rendered pages, but i probably should move it into a vm if i want to be completely safe lol

Wait, you're serious?

Maybe I'll finally move it into a VM so I can send a link to it here without tempting people :P

I designed a chip architecture that runs bash code on silicon.

I reimplemented x86 assembly in purely bash script.

Set -e, please for the love of god, set -e

you do realize that you can just use Apache instead of writing your own rust program for this, as this is more or less the CGI standard?

I know about the CGI standard, but mine does things a little differently (executable files don't just render pages but also handle logging, access control, etc. when put in special positions within a directory), so I still think it was worth the afternoon i spent making it.

Yeah, especially if you did this for practice.

Just saying, that apache, for big projects, is more battle-hardened. ;-)

Oh yeah definitely, Apache is way better for anything remotely serious.

Before nginx was a thing, I worked with a guy who forked apache httpd and wrote this blog in C, like, literally embedded html and css inside the server, so when he made a tpyo or was adding another post he had to recompile the source code. The performance was out of this world.

There are a lot of solutions like that in rust. You basically compile the template into your code.

yeah, templates can be parsed at compile time but these frameworks are not embeeding whole fucking prerendered static pages/assets

They are nowadays. Compiling assets and static data into rust and deliver virtual DOM via websocket to the browser is the new cool kid in the corner.

Have a look at dioxus

Compiling all assets into the binary is trivial in rust. When I have a small web server that generates everything in code I usually compile the favicon into the binary.

Does a file lookup really take that long? Id say the trick was to have just plain old html with no bloat and you're golden.

Blog content was stored in memory and it was served with zero-copy to the socket, so yea, it's way faster. It was before times of php-fpm and opcache that we're using now. Back then things were deployed and communicated using tcp sockets (tcp to rails, django or php) or reading from a disk, when the best HDDs were 5600rpm, but rare to find on shared hosting.

Couldn't the html be loaded into memory at the beginning of the program and then served whenever? I understand the reading from disk will be slow, but that only happens once in the beginning.

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This reminds me of one of my older projects. I wanted to learn more about network communications, so I started working on a simple P2P chat app. It wasn't anything fancy, but I really enjoyed working on it. One challenge I faced was that, at the time, I didn't know how to listen for user input while handling network communication simultaneously. So, after I had managed to get multiple TCP sockets working on one thread, I thought, why not open another socket for HTTP communication? That way, I could incorporate a fancy web UI instead of just a CLI interface.

So, I wrote a simple HTTP server, which, in hindsight, might not have been necessary.

Ah, you met fefe.

Fefe uses a LDAP server as backend, not Apache

He uses his own http server called gatling and an LDAP server instead of a database.

He also uses his own http server that in turn queries the ldap server solely for the articles. The rest is compiled into the http server binary.

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What if, get this, we put the bash scripts in yaml. And then put it in kubernetes.

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This is false, you also need vim and tmux

Idk about you but I use echo and sed to edit my files.

I'm currently trying to relearn all my advanced bash in python.

i already learned how to use my operating system, now you're telling me I have to learn 30 new libraries that do the exact same shit?

no, you'll also have to learns each libraries special quirks on your OS

Just for fun or do you have a specific thing you feel would be better in python?

Certain things I want to do will be easier in python and will be more portable. But bash is my home.

Fair enough. The line for me has always been whether or not I expect to use it for more than just glue or a one off run

Just don't call it with #!/bin/sh. Because that's POSIX shell, not bash.

but effectively it's bash, I think /bin/sh is a symlink to bash on every system I know of...

Edit: I feel corrected, thanks for the information, all the systems I used, had a symlink to bash. Also it was not intended to recommend using bash functionality when having a shebang !#/bin/sh. As someone other pointed out, recommendation would be #!/usr/bin/env bash, or !#/bin/sh if you know that you're not using bash specific functionality.

Still don't do this. If you use bash specific syntax with this head, that's a bashism and causes issues with people using zsh for example. Or with Debian/*buntu, who use dash as init shell.

Just use #!/bin/bash or #!/usr/bin/env bash if you're funny.

#!/bin/bash doesn't work on NixOS since bash is in the nix store somewhere, #!/usr/bin/env bash resolves the correct location regardless of where bash is

Are there any distos with /usr/bin/env in a different spot? I still believe that's the best approach for getting bash.

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/bin/bash won't work on every system for example NixOS some other systems may have bash in /usr/bin or elsewhere

NixOS didn't do /usr merge?

Binaries are not in /usr/bin or /bin except for /bin/sh and /usr/bin/env. Programs should not assume fixed paths for binaries and instead look for them in $PATH.

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No no no no no, do not believe this you will shoot yourself in the foot.

https://wiki.debian.org/Shell

Beginning with DebianSqueeze, Debian uses Dash as the target of the /bin/sh symlink. Dash lacks many of the features one would expect in an interactive shell, making it faster and more memory efficient than Bash.

From DebianSqueeze to DebianBullseye, it was possible to select bash as the target of the /bin/sh symlink (by running dpkg-reconfigure dash). As of DebianBookworm, this is no longer supported.

It is a symlink, but bash will automatically enable posix compliance mode if you use it. So any bash specific features will bomb out unless you explicitly reset it in the script.

Wut that is not even the case for Ubuntu. You're probably thinking of dash example:

sh -c '[[ true ]] && echo ya' 
# sh: 1: [[: not found

bash -c '[[ true ]] && echo ya' 
# ya

i thought most unix-like systems had it symlinked to a shell like dash. it's what i have on my system (void linux), of course not as an interactive shell lol

i use #!/bin/sh for posix scripts and #!/usr/bin/env bash for bash scripts. #!/bin/sh works for posix scripts since even if it's symlinked to bash, bash still supports posix features.

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You're not at scale unless you're deploying OpenStack to run a WordPress site.

All you need are Bash scripts with chroot and cgroups and some ssh access.