archelond 0.3.0

Installation and Configuration

pip install archelond

Security is obviously important for shell history, and to setup authentication we use basic authentication using apache htpasswd files as the user database. To add one for yourself and configure archelond to use it, run something like:

htpasswd -c ~/.htpasswd username
export HTPASSWD_PATH=~/.htpasswd

After that minimal setup we can try things out with just a simple command of:

archelond

Which will fire up the debug/development server using an in memory bash history data store that is very forgetful. Once it is up, you should be able to go http://localhost:8580/, login with the username and password you created in your htpasswd file, and see a lovely welcome page. To check out the sample commands you can go to http://localhost:8580/api/v1/history or get your token for use with archelonc http://localhost:8580/api/v1/token.

Wiring Up to Elasticsearch

In order to have your history survive start ups we can use Elasticsearch. You can either install it locally, or grab it from an add-on on Heroku. Once you have the connection URL, we just need to add a couple environment variables to point at the service and set the storage provider class with something like:

export ARCHELOND_ELASTICSEARCH_URL='http://localhost:9200'
export ARCHELOND_ELASTICSEARCH_INDEX='history'
export ARCHELOND_DATABASE='ElasticData'

The index can be changed, but is the index in elasticsearch that will be used to store the history.

Running in Production

Running the archelond is good for testing out, but to run it in production you will want to run it through a proper wsgi application server. As an example, we’ve added uwsgi in the requirements and it can be run in production with something like:

uwsgi --http :8580 -w archelond.web:app

and then a Web server like nginx proxying over https in order to further secure your shell history.

archelond

web: uwsgi uwsgi.ini

[uwsgi]
http-socket = :$(PORT)
master = true
processes = 10
die-on-term = true
module = archelond.web:app
memory-report = true

ARCHELOND_DATABASE="ElasticData"
ARCHELOND_ELASTICSEARCH_INDEX="my_index"
ARCHELOND_ELASTICSEARCH_URL="http://example.com/elastic_search"
ARCHELOND_FLASK_SECRET="a_very_long_randomized_string"
ARCHELOND_HTPASSWD="username:hashfromhtpasswd"
ARCHELOND_HTPASSWD_PATH="htpasswd"