tools

Overview ¶

Tools provides utility functions useful for web servers

Also check out the optional ask.systems/daemon/tools/flags library which provides -version and -syslog when you include it.

Common features:

• Run a web server with graceful shutdown when the quit channel is closed in one function call. Prefer RunHTTPServerTLS.
• Easily setup standard signal handlers to close your quit channel with CloseOnQuitSignals
• Generate random tokens or secret URL paths with RandomString
• Authenticate users via HTTP basic auth with BasicAuthHandler
• SecureHTTPDir which is a way to use http.FileServer and not serve directory listings, as well as password protect directories with .passwords files. ask.systems/daemon/host uses this so it's only needed if you want a file server as part a larger application.

Less common features:

• Generate self signed certificates and be your own Certificate Authority. These certificate functions are used by ask.systems/daemon/portal and the ask.systems/daemon/portal/gate client library. You only need them if you want to do extra custom certificate logic.
• Enforce HTTPS only with RedirectToHTTPS. ask.systems/daemon/portal uses this for all client connections, and will only connect to your backend via HTTPS. So you don't really need to use this unless you're accepting connections from clients other than portal.
• Create a flag that parses with no value and runs a callback when it is parsed with BoolFuncFlag. This is how -version and -syslog from ask.systems/daemon/tools/flags works.
• Prepend the current timestamp to any io.Writer.Write calls with TimestampWriter. This can be used for log files. This is already used by -syslog and the default log package prints the same timestamp format by default so this is only useful if you are working with custom output streams that you want timestamps for.