HMC Weekly: Shhh, it's a secret

Mariano Uvalle is our server admin. You may reach the author at jmug@handmadecities.com

Hey Handmade folks,

I hope you’re enjoying the last days of October, and getting ready for end of year festivities! I have a quick announcement, and a concrete ask:

New secrets service and library

For those that are not caught up to speed, my current goal is to containerize and unify the heterogeneous set of services that run our community. Abner handed over a few repos that I have kept private because they contained hardcoded shared secrets. That changes today!

I’ve been working on shhh, a library for pki utilities, mTLS auth, and secrets storage. It’s still barebones, but will serve us perfectly fine for our current use case.

shhh serves two purposes, act as our shared secrets server (and client library), as well as being a blueprint for the rest of containerized Go services that we end up building/porting. The secrets server part is already deployed to one of our VPSes, with a container built by our own Gitead action runners. So we’re ready for prime time!

Porting meetups

As of today, meetups contains the backend Python implementation for meetupinvite2000 (the tool meetup hosts use to send newsletters and invite users). I’ve scrubbed it of secrets and annotated it to the best of my knowledge. If you’re interested in porting this to Go, containerize it, and help migrating it. Please reach out!

Closing thoughts

I’m very happy with this new setup, it will lead to easier collaboration; I’m excited to see what we build together.

There’s another 3 repos that are still private, I’ll scrub them and release them in the upcoming weeks.

If you’re interested in helping in any way, please reply to this email, or tag me in the Help Wanted revolt channel

Until next time,
Mariano