tvl-depot/web
sterni 93a746aaaa feat(web/bubblegum): nix CGI programming framework
So here is what has been keeping me up at night: At some point I
realized that nix actually made a somewhat passable language for CGI
programming:

* That `builtins.getEnv` exists as one of the impurities of Nix is
  perfect as environment variables are the main way of communication
  from the web server to the CGI application.

* We can actually read from the filesystem via builtins.readDir and
  builtins.readFile with bearable overhead if we avoid importing the
  used paths into the nix store.

* Templating and routing are convenient to implement via indented strings
  and attribute sets respectively.

Of course there are obvious limitation:

* The overhead of derivations is probably much to great for them to be
  useful via IfD.

* Even without derivations, nix evaluation is very slow to the point
  were a trivial application takes between 100ms and 400ms to produce a
  response.

* We can't really cause effects other than producing a response which
  makes it not viable for a lot of applications. There are some ways
  around this:

  * With a custom interpreter we could have streaming and multiplexed
    I/O (using lazy lists emulated via attrsets) to cause such effects,
    but it would probably perform terribly.

  * We can use builtins.fetchurl to call other HTTP-based microservices,
    but only in very limited constraints, i. e. only GET, no headers,
    and only if the tarball ttl is set to 0 in the global nix.conf.

* Terrible error handling capabilities because builtins.tryEval actually
  doesn't catch a lot of errors.

To prove that it actually works, there are some demo applications,
which I invite you to run and potentially break horribly:

    nix-build -A web.bubblegum.examples && ./result
    # navigate to http://localhost:9000

The setup uses thttpd and executes the nix CGI scripts using
users.sterni.nint which automatically passed `depot`, so they can
import the cgi library.

Change-Id: I3a22a749612211627e5f8301c31ec2e7a872812c
Reviewed-on: https://cl.tvl.fyi/c/depot/+/2746
Tested-by: BuildkiteCI
Reviewed-by: tazjin <mail@tazj.in>
2021-04-01 18:50:36 +00:00
..
bubblegum feat(web/bubblegum): nix CGI programming framework 2021-04-01 18:50:36 +00:00
cgit-taz revert(web/tvl): Revert 's/The V/tazjin's v/"' 2021-03-31 19:21:04 +00:00
panettone feat(web/panettone): Noping issue authors' usernames 2021-03-28 17:07:01 +00:00
todolist style(web/todolist): List paths without 'At ' prefix 2021-04-01 16:53:14 +00:00
tvl chore(web/tvl): Remove some former members 2021-03-31 22:21:46 +00:00