May 15, 2019 by Drew DeVault

What's cooking on Sourcehut? May 2019

Another month of Sourcehut development passes! I’ve got some really cool news to share today. And a big welcome to our 240 new users, who bring our total up to 8,560. Thanks again to everyone for supporting Sourcehut during the alpha! I’d like to briefly remind you that Sourcehut depends on your financial support to thrive - please consider purchasing a subscription if you haven’t yet. We just released our Q1 financial report, which breaks down our income today and explains where your subscription fee ends up:

Please let me know if you have any questions. Now to the development news!

lists.sr.ht

Let’s start with lists.sr.ht, because I have some exciting news: the initial version of web-based code review is now available! Check out an example here.

This is generated from a normal patch review, with no additional human input. You just respond to patch emails like you always have, and lists.sr.ht automatically applies heuristics to incoming emails to generate a web view of that discussion. In the future, I intend to expand on this with support for authoring reviews on the web, as well as expanding git.sr.ht to support sending patchsets from the web.

git.sr.ht, hg.sr.ht

git.sr.ht and hg.sr.ht both now have an API! The API reference can be found here.

Docs for the hg.sr.ht API are pending a design for how to expose hg.sr.ht internals over the API, but is compatible with the git.sr.ht API for any API method not dealing with git internals.

They also support webhooks - and there’s a pretty neat feature that comes with. When you configure a post-update webhook (equivalent to git’s own post-update hook), you have the option of making it synchronous - this will submit the HTTP request during git push, and will print the response body to the console of the person executing git push. This can be used for custom integrations which behave like git.sr.ht does when submitting builds.sr.ht jobs, printing the URLs of the jobs which started as a consequence of your git push.

hg.sr.ht has also grown support for the Mercurial evolve plugin this month - thanks to Ludovic again for working on that! You can enable this support on your repo’s settings, under the “features” tab. Ludovic and I will be attending an Mercurial conference in Paris in 2 weeks, where we hope to discuss this and more features for hg.sr.ht in the future.

todo.sr.ht

You can now submit tickets and participate in discussions on todo.sr.ht by sending an email to the tracker you want to work with. For example, to file a bug for todo.sr.ht, you can email it to ~sircmpwn/todo.sr.ht@todo.sr.ht.

You can also do things like closing tickets via email - docs here.

I’ve also started working on an API for todo.sr.ht. It’s fairly complete now, but I still haven’t written the docs. Stay tuned!

builds.sr.ht

I’m happy to announce that OpenBSD is now supported on builds.sr.ht!

Major thanks to Jarkko Oranen for putting in the work to realize this feature. Timothée Floure has also made some improvements to Fedora support, and Francesco Gazzetta added NixOS 19.03. Thanks to Andres Erbsen as well, who fixed a bug with git submodules which have been updated outside of the default branch. My friend minus has also helped me set up an experimental caching proxy for Alpine Linux packages, which shaves a few seconds off of every Alpine Linux job. I’d like to expand this to other distros and things like npm and pypi as well.

meta.sr.ht

Our friends at Gitlab were recently in the news, as several of their users had their repositories overwritten with a ransom notice. The cause of this was users with weak passwords. I’d like to briefly share how Sourcehut is not affected by the same problem, and explain improvements I made to the service anyway.

First, I take a backup of git.sr.ht every 5 minutes. I can restore the state of your repository as it appeared at any point in time in the event that your account is compromised. Additionally, login attempts to sr.ht are throttled and monitored for suspicious activity, and I get an alarm when someone is making a lot of login requests, which quickly leads to an IP block and an investigation of any successful logins.

Even so, I’ve taken this opportunity to improve Sourcehut to prevent this, by enforcing strong password requirements when you sign up and when you reset your password. No, I don’t accomplish this with silly requirements for multiple numbers and letters and symbols and such - instead, I use Dropbox’s zxcvbn library to estimate the entropy of your password and require a minimum inherit complexity. In the case where your password isn’t strong enough, you’ll be shown a message like this:

This password is too weak - it could be cracked in less than 5 minutes if our database were broken into. Try using a few words instead of random letters and symbols. A password manager is strongly recommended.

I haven’t enforced these requirements retroactively, so if you’re concerned about your account you should reset your password here.

You can also review your audit log on this page to check for any suspicious activity on your account. Shoot me an email if you have any concerns.

paste.sr.ht

Thanks to Mykyta Holubakha, you now have the option to set the visibility of your pastes on paste.sr.ht. The “public” and “unlisted” options are presently indistinguishable, though, because there’s no public profile page for listing someone else’s pastes at yet. Hopefully we’ll see that soon!