hacking on tangled#

We highly recommend installing nix (the package manager) before working on the codebase. The nix flake provides a lot of helpers to get started and most importantly, builds and dev shells are entirely deterministic.

To set up your dev environment:

nix develop

Non-nix users can look at the devShell attribute in the flake.nix file to determine necessary dependencies.

running the appview#

The nix flake also exposes a few app attributes (run nix flake show to see a full list of what the flake provides), one of the apps runs the appview with the air live-reloader:

TANGLED_DEV=true nix run .#watch-appview

# TANGLED_DB_PATH might be of interest to point to
# different sqlite DBs

# in a separate shell, you can live-reload tailwind
nix run .#watch-tailwind

To authenticate with the appview, you will need redis and OAUTH JWKs to be setup:

# oauth jwks should already be setup by the nix devshell:
echo $TANGLED_OAUTH_JWKS
{"crv":"P-256","d":"tELKHYH-Dko6qo4ozYcVPE1ah6LvXHFV2wpcWpi8ab4","kid":"1753352226","kty":"EC","x":"mRzYpLzAGq74kJez9UbgGfV040DxgsXpMbaVsdy8RZs","y":"azqqXzUYywMlLb2Uc5AVG18nuLXyPnXr4kI4T39eeIc"}

# if not, you can set it up yourself:
go build -o genjwks.out ./cmd/genjwks
export TANGLED_OAUTH_JWKS="$(./genjwks.out)"

# run redis in at a new shell to store oauth sessions
redis-server

running a knot#

An end-to-end knot setup requires setting up a machine with sshd, AuthorizedKeysCommand, and git user, which is quite cumbersome. So the nix flake provides a nixosConfiguration to do so.

To begin, grab your DID from http://localhost:3000/settings. Then, set TANGLED_VM_KNOT_OWNER and TANGLED_VM_SPINDLE_OWNER to your DID.

If you don't want to set up a spindle, you can use any placeholder value.

You can now start a lightweight NixOS VM like so:

nix run --impure .#vm

# type `poweroff` at the shell to exit the VM

This starts a knot on port 6000, a spindle on port 6555 with ssh exposed on port 2222.

Once the services are running, head to http://localhost:3000/knots and hit verify (and similarly, http://localhost:3000/spindles to verify your spindle). It should verify the ownership of the services instantly if everything went smoothly.

You can push repositories to this VM with this ssh config block on your main machine:

Host nixos-shell
    Hostname localhost
    Port 2222
    User git
    IdentityFile ~/.ssh/my_tangled_key

Set up a remote called local-dev on a git repo:

git remote add local-dev git@nixos-shell:user/repo
git push local-dev main

running a spindle#

The above VM should already be running a spindle on localhost:6555. Head to http://localhost:3000/spindles and hit verify. You can then configure each repository to use this spindle and run CI jobs.

Of interest when debugging spindles:

# service logs from journald:
journalctl -xeu spindle

# CI job logs from disk:
ls /var/log/spindle

# debugging spindle db:
sqlite3 /var/lib/spindle/spindle.db

# litecli has a nicer REPL interface:
litecli /var/lib/spindle/spindle.db