MagLit VS Knex

On the privacy front, we're never going to compromise the user data, never going to sell it, never going to share it with anybody else. We'll be making writedown self-hostable as well.

On the security front, we're using firebase firestore as the database. So at rest, it's well encrypted.

We're thinking of introducing some sort of encryption via passwords (kinda how I already am doing it on https://maglit.me). E2EE would be quite difficult and would affect the usability.

maglit.me, can use custom links and is privacy respecting

jesus christ use https://maglit.me/ so your link will not be so fucking fat.

There are many services that offer such a functionality. Just search for "password protected link shortener". One example would be https://maglit.me/ by u/NayamAmarshe (I haven't tried it, I only read this post). However if you care for privacy (kind of the point of the whole post) and you have a web server you might want to selfhost the service (has a lot of other advantages as well, link all the easy to remember keywords are still available), which gives you even more options: like again MagLit or YOURLS with the Password Protection Plugin. (disclaimer: I am using a self hosted YOURLS instance myself, but have not used this plugin yet).

Knex.js

AdonisJS core team has created/maintains Lucid. It is a SQL query builder, and an Active Record ORM built on top of Knex.

Now, why not use an ORM? I've seen performance issues too many times with ORMs. I prefer writing my own SQL to avoid surprises. After all, I know the database schema and writing code for a specific purpose very often leads to better performance than generic code. ORMs have to support all kinds of database schemas. I only have to support mine. Having successfully used Knex.js in NodeJS (a popular query builder) in the past, I know writing SQL queries myself is not hard and provides very good performance.

Given the dynamic nature of the schema, we employ Knex, a query builder, for database access.

https://www.npmjs.com/package/knex - 779 issues

# related: https://github.com/knex/knex/issues/2354

This article will be focused on a security issue that I found in Knex and how to mitigate it, but I'll also talk briefly about the social aspects of this problem.

SQL is an old, irregular language to work with, but it is better known than HCL and SQL already has it's own Pulumi/CDK in the form of every ORM with introspection (like Javascript's Prisma, Python's Django, Go's XO etc) and QueryBuilder (LINQ, Knex, etc) in whatever programming language you prefer. You probably already know it.