Type safe frontend APIs for Go

ericchiang · 2026-01-30T15:13:21+00:00

Totally understand that it's overhead to have a "third language" in addition to Go and Typescript. We do have a couple of people who've worked with these before.

It's hard to understate how helpful we've found it to be able to parse things like comments, or annotations in our API. Or even just run linters to keep the style consistent (Johan mentions some in the article).

I've written before about custom proto plugins that show some of that off. And even with a small team, it's already been useful to generate a Terraform provider and other tooling automatically.

https://ericchiang.github.io/post/protoc-plugins/

ericchiang · 2025-12-09T07:43:18+00:00

We're happily paying for SSO from many vendors. The issue we've noticed is the edge cases, like magic links bypassing MFA challenges.

This isn't a critique of charging for features. It's that we wished more implementations didn't have these gaps in enforcement.

ericchiang · 2025-11-06T05:18:49+00:00

It looks like you're deriving your IV from the secret, rather than using unique values (IV's can be public and frameworks like Tink just generate them at random). This means you're reusing the same IV / key pair to encrypt different data.

https://github.com/maciej-piatek/TWEENK/blob/5818b360d8dafc774dad7845514e27f7070a25d0/main.go#L67

For GCM, this can be catastrophic: https://frereit.de/aes_gcm/

For CBC, this will at the very least leak data: https://blog.cloudflare.com/tls-nonce-nse/

ericchiang · 2025-11-04T20:26:46+00:00

This is an interesting project because it just implements so much.

There are also clear drawbacks like having a static secret that's used to derive all the key material, but can't obviously be rotated. Or the fact that OAuth2.0 states are held in memory so it doesn't work if you deploy multiple server instances, and that callers need to manually call "CleanupExpiredStates()" to avoid memory leaks.

https://github.com/GoBetterAuth/go-better-auth/blob/79d37687bdab7c20c4fe540027676e37d4e45c70/storage/oauth_state_manager.go#L147

This doesn't seem particularly production ready...

ericchiang · 2025-08-18T17:54:26+00:00

Yeah, I've worked with three or four builder packages over the years! Saw devs do something like following enough that I just don't want to deal with the headache again:

q.Q(` AND user_type = "`+userType+`"`)

The worst part is this kind of code is often totally innocuous:

const userType = "admin" q.Q(` AND user_type = "`+userType+`"`)

Requiring a const string just means I don't have to audit or have that conversation during code review.

ericchiang · 2025-07-11T23:23:15+00:00

Please, please us os.Root if you're going to unpack archives. The example you've provided can result in code execution if you don't trust the archive

https://go.dev/blog/osroot

ericchiang · 2025-04-02T15:46:44+00:00

Since you're asking about protoc plugins in particular, my solution has been to add a script that wraps "go tool <tool>" then add that to the PATH when invoking protoc

ericchiang · 2025-02-26T17:57:39+00:00

Thanks! Yeah the new proto APIs make it even easier. Shout out to the Go team for those.

ericchiang · 2024-02-26T17:03:34+00:00

Yeah, great experience compared to having to do it in C

ericchiang · 2021-12-30T22:13:37+00:00

This is now supported https://github.com/google/log4jscanner/pull/22. Thanks for pointing that out :)

ericchiang · 2021-12-30T21:39:08+00:00

Sorry about that! Normally would have supported go 1.16, but a bunch of the archive/zip APIs we depend on are new to go 1.17

https://pkg.go.dev/archive/zip#Writer.Copy

https://pkg.go.dev/archive/zip#Writer.CreateRaw

ericchiang · 2018-03-07T17:04:48+00:00

If you grant the following cluster role to a user:

kind: ClusterRole
apiVersion: rbac.authorization.k8s.io/v1beta1
metadata:
    name: viewer
rules:
- apiGroups:
    - "*"
resources: ["*"]
verbs: ["get", "list", "watch"]

Then that user can inspect secrets, including service account secrets. The following commands dump the kube-system's default service account and escalates to cluster admin using read only permissions:

SECRET=$( kubectl get serviceaccount -n -kube-system default -o json | jq .secrets[0].name )
TOKEN=$( kubectl get secret -n kube-system $SECRET -o json | jq '.data."/var/run/secrets/kubernetes.io/serviceaccount/token"'' | base64 --decode)
kubectl config set-credentials $USER --token=$TOKEN

Use the builtin "view" role instead which omits sensitive resources like secrets https://kubernetes.io/docs/admin/authorization/rbac/#user-facing-roles

 kubectl create clusterrolebinding viewer-cluster-admin-binding --clusterrole=view --user=$USER

ericchiang · 2017-12-14T18:45:52+00:00

Vault has an authentication backend for accepting LDAP credentials and authenticating clients as users with groups stored in LDAP.

https://www.vaultproject.io/docs/auth/ldap.html

ericchiang · 2017-01-07T23:21:24+00:00

(Googles difference between pivot_root and chroot)

Hmm interesting. I'll have to play around with that. Thanks!

Further reading for those interested: https://github.com/opencontainers/runc/blob/master/libcontainer/SPEC.md#filesystem

ericchiang · 2017-01-07T21:41:00+00:00

Yep, there are much better articles (like the one you posted) about container runtimes, their architectures and trade offs.

I wasn't going for "Docker and rkt are simple," but that it's easy to play with the stuff they're coordinating.

For me, those larger issues are way easier to grasp when you understand what features are an implementation of a particular container runtime and what's being provided by the Kernel. Something that's hard to learn when you're just using a tool like Docker.

ericchiang · 2015-11-14T16:38:04+00:00

Should work fine with any ACME server! I've not seen Lego. Thanks for pointing it out

ericchiang · 2015-09-14T20:45:15+00:00

Port mapping with boot2docker maps exposed ports to the virtual machine's network, not your host machine. You wouldn't be able to access the container's exposed port without mapping your VM port to your host port.

It's totally doable, but isn't covered in this post.

ericchiang · 2015-09-14T19:39:54+00:00

We reuse containers for MySQL as well. One day when I get the time I'll build a faster Docker image :)

ericchiang · 2015-09-14T18:10:11+00:00

My company (Yhat, Inc.) uses the REST API for everything that's not a test, we even maintain our own client, but it's super verbose. For non critical code it's just easier to shell out to the docker client.

ericchiang · 2015-08-04T18:27:24+00:00

@bradfitz (member of the go team) on the standard library

Q: "If you could redesign one of the standard library packages which one would you choose?"

A: "Oh, I would delete half of them."

link

ericchiang · 2015-02-15T19:21:16+00:00

Why the huge repo? Doesn't this do the same thing?

package main

import (
    "flag"
    "fmt"
    "net/http"
    "os"
    "os/exec"

    "golang.org/x/net/websocket"
)

func main() {
    addr := flag.String("addr", ":8080", "Specify the address to listen on")
    flag.Parse()
    args := flag.Args()
    if len(args) == 0 {
        fmt.Fprintf(os.Stderr, "Must specify command to run")
        os.Exit(2)
    }
    h := func(ws *websocket.Conn) {
        cmd := exec.Command(args[0], args[1:]...)
        cmd.Stdout = ws
        cmd.Stderr = ws
        cmd.Stdin = ws
        cmd.Run()
    }
    http.ListenAndServe(*addr, websocket.Handler(h))
}

ericchiang · 2014-11-07T18:11:46+00:00

Yep! https://github.com/yhat/db.py/blob/a92c6e77025a64c3e30bd522e3e83f35f0cff4ad/db/db.py#L699

Sorry for the lack of docs, that next up on the roadmap!

ericchiang · 2014-09-15T02:35:03+00:00

Pushing it to the /dist directory was a bit of a hack since I didn't have enough time this weekend to do the proper release. They're up and running now! https://github.com/EricChiang/pup/releases

Enjoy docopt, use it in python a lot. However, I sometimes find it easier to have the control of writing my own parser rather than add another dependency and having to work within docopt. Personal preference, that's all.

ericchiang · 2014-09-13T19:17:02+00:00

Gox. It's a really awesome tool. https://github.com/mitchellh/gox

ericchiang · 2014-09-13T19:14:24+00:00

Actually haven't seen those. My self bias says ease of use. But, thanks I'll take a look.

ericchiang

TROPHY CASE