pipe.pico.sh is our new managed pubsub service that enables networked *nix pipes over ssh.

pipe is built off our generic pubsub golang pkg.

Example #

1# term 1
2echo "hello world!" | ssh pipe.pico.sh pub hello
3# term 2
4ssh pipe.pico.sh sub hello

Go to pipe for more examples.

Why? #

We needed an event system to communicate between our services and users. We could have used an off-the-shelf solution like mqtt but being a hacker lab where we like to experiement with the ssh protocol, we thought we could create something even simpler and just as powerful.

Further, authentication is handled automatically with ssh. We also don't like asking users to install yet-another-cli-tool.

How we using it? #

For awhile now we have wanted a couple of features that required an event system:

• Providing user logs
• Webhooks for imgs and other ideas

User logs #

We have been spending a lot of time structuring our service logs in an effort ot make it easier for us to debug issues. Futher, it's very common for a user to submit a bug request only to discover it was some user configuration error causing the "bug." If we had a way to provide the logs we use to our users, they could theoretically debug the issue themselves.

So while building pipe we figured out a robust way to provide realtime logs to users with minimal effort. At pico we have standardized on slog which has a middleware system to integrate with third-party services like sentry or other log drains.

The moment we are able to determine the user within our services, we add a tag to the logs which then lets us scope the logs to a specific user. These are the logs the end-user will be able to see.

So we built a pipe integration with slog that will send all our service logs to log-drain topic in our pipe service.

The benefits are multi-fold:

• Admins (us) have quick access to a central log-drain
• Users can now access their scoped user logs which are the same logs we have access to
• Since we productized our logs, we are spending a lot more time tuning and formatting them to be more useful than ever before

Further, because our pubsub system leverages ssh we get automatic authentication as well as the ability to easily pipe our logs to something like jq:

1ssh pico.sh logs | jq

It's really that simple!

Webhooks for imgs #

We wanted to provide a way for users to receive docker registry notifications.

1# term1: subscribe to updates, pull and redeploy
2ssh imgs.sh sub alpine:latest | docker compose pull && docker compose up -d
3# term2: some ci system pushing an image to imgs registry
4ssh -L 1338:localhost:80 -N imgs.sh
5docker push localhost:1338/alpine:latest

We are excited about this service and thinks it's pretty useful.