pasten

pasten

pasten is a Go implementation of a Cassandra backed pastebin. It stores its data in cassandra in the most simple way you could think of:

• Paste IDs are implemented as row keys.
• Paste properties such as owner, title, content or syntax are columns.

Multiple pastebins are supported by specifying separate column families, or, if desired, entirely separate keyspaces.

Requirements

In order to install pasten, you need to install a few prerequisites:

• golang-go
• golang-ancientauth
• golang-doozer-exportedservice
• golang-cassandra

Installation

Once you have these, just run

go build

to complete the build process. You will then receive a binary called pasten which implements the pastebin service.

To set up the database, use cassandra-cli to connect to a local Cassandra instance, then run the commands from the cassandra-schema file. Change them as appropriate (e.g. if you want to use different settings for the keyspace which is created).

You will need a certificate signed by the authority which your instance of the Ancient Login Service runs. If you store the certificate as pasten.pem and the key as pasten.key in DER format in your running directory, you don't need to specify the key path flags.

Once this is done, just invoke the binary like:

./pasten --template-dir=templates --bind="[::]:8888"

Point your browser to http://localhost:8888/ to see if it worked.

Performance

On a test, 100 serial requests for a single paste took about 1 seconds. Response times are typically somewhere around 1 millisecond.

Monitoring

Like any good Go program, pasten exports a few variables under /debug/vars:

• ancientauth-expired-requests: number of redirected requests from AncientAuth which have already expired; if this number is very high, it's possible that the system clock is not in sync.
• ancientauth-unknown-root-ca: the AncientAuth server signed the request with a CA this service doesn't recognize. Is the --cacert path set correctly?
• ancientauth-broken-requests: number of AncientAuth request packages which could not be parsed.
• ancientauth-forged-requests: number of AncientAuth authentication claims whose signature could not be verified.
• ancientauth-cert-expired: number of AncientAuth authentication claims signed by an expired certificate. If you see this, check the certificate of the login server as well as the local clock on the server running pasten.
• ancientauth-unsupported-algos: number of AncientAuth authentication claims which could not be verified because they used an unsupported signature algorithm. If this number is higher than 0, this might mean that the AncientAuth server and client version diverged too far.
• ancientauth-unauthorized-requests: number of requests to add/edit a paste which came from users which were not logged in yet and were redirected to the login server.
• ancientauth-login-requests: number of times a requestor was sent to the login service.
• ancientauth-login-passed: number of requests which successfully logged in an user which was not logged in before.
• ancientauth-generic-errors: unspecified type of AncientAuth errors, check the logs.
• cassandra-not-found: number of records which Cassandra couldn't find in the database.
• cassandra-found: number of times a record was found successfully in the Cassandra database.
• cassandra-errors: number of errors, mapped by type, which ocurred talking to the Cassandra server.
• num-requests: total number of HTTP requests received by the binary.
• num-notfounds: total number of paste lookups which could not be retrieved as they didn't exist.
• num-views: number of times a paste was requested for viewing.
• num-edits: number of times a paste was added or edited.

Roadmap

For future releases, we are planning to add the following features:

Version 1.0 will feature better web design and pastes which can be set to expire after a given time.

There are also vague plans to add syntax highlighting for different languages.

BUGS

Bugs for this project are tracked using ditz in the source code tree itself. The current state of bug squashing can be viewed at http://pasten.ancient-solutions.com/bugtracker/

To report bugs, please send a pull request with the ditz bug added to the project caoimhechaos/pasten on GitHub.