boringproxy VS go-sqlite3

boringproxy - Designed to be very easy to use. No config files. Clients can be remote-controlled through a simple WebUI and/or REST API on the server.

A couple of years ago I've read about this concept (already forgot the name) of using self hosted data storage with cloud applications. Basically, you as a user own your data and only permit the cloud hosted web application to access it - not own it and manage in your place.

I was thinking of a similar concept, but in the context of mobile applications. The mobile application itself would be accessible via Google Play Store/App Store, but the backend part would be self hosted and upon opening the application you would have to specify how to access backend.

My question is how would I access the backend if it was hosted on let's say rpi running in the living room? It's not a problem as long as I'm within the home network, but I want seemless network transition without losing access when entering/leaving the house. I was told https://www.cloudflare.com/en-gb/products/zero-trust/access/ could be used for this, but to me it sounds a bit of an overkill to use it for an application which would never be used by more than a single digit amount of users. This looks more suitable: https://github.com/boringproxy/boringproxy

Finally, someone in the above project's Matrix room directed me towards boringproxy - https://github.com/boringproxy/boringproxy. This was the perfect solution. No lengthy config files, easy to use and automate. Setup took about an hour and now everything is back up and running. The only issue I've currently not been able to solve is one where the container seems to use a websocket, which keeps getting timed out (will investigate this further tomorrow).

boringproxy (GitHub) is my go-to for this sort of thing. Thanks for the announcement, I'll have to do a head-to-head and see how they stack up!

boringproxy

Am I the only one who thinks SQLite is still too complicated for many programs? Maybe it's just the particular type of software I normally work on, which tends towards small, self-hosted networking services[0] that would often have a single user, or maybe federated with <100 users. These programs need a small amount of state for things like tokens, users accounts, and maybe a bit of domain-specific things. This can all live in memory, but needs to be persisted to disk on writes. I've reached for SQLite several times, and always come back to just keeping a struct of hashmaps[1] in memory and dumping JSON to disk. It's worked great for my needs.

Now obviously if I wanted to scale up, at some point you would have too many users to fit in memory. But do programs at that scale actually need to exist? Why can't everyone be on a federated server with state that fits in memory/JSON? I guess that's more of a philosophical question about big tech. But I think it's interesting that most of our tech stack choices are driven by projects designed to work at a scale most of us will never need, and maybe nobody needs.

[0]: https://boringproxy.io/

[1]: https://github.com/boringproxy/boringproxy/blob/master/datab...

This is the commit that seems to have broken the docker image.

I use https://github.com/boringproxy/boringproxy

SQLite encryption at-rest is a hot requested feature of both the “default” CGo driver [1] and the transpiled alternative driver [2]. So, this is a feature I wanted to bring to my own Wasm based Go driver/bindings [3].

Open-source SQLite encryption extensions have had a troubled last few years. For whatever reason, in 2020 the (undocumented) feature that made it easy to offer page-level encryption was removed [4]. Some solutions are stuck with SQLite 3.31.1, but Ulrich Telle stepped up with a VFS approach [5].

Still, their solution seemed harder than something I'd want to maintain, as it requires understanding the structure of what's being written to disk at the VFS layer. So, I looked at full disk encryption for something with less of an impedance mismatch.

Specifically, I'm using the Adiantum tweakable and length-preserving encryption (with 4K blocks, matching the default SQLite page size), and encrypting whole files (rather than page content).

I'm not a cryptographer, so I'd really appreciate some roasting before release.

There is nothing very Go specific about this (apart from the implementation) so if there are no obvious flaws, it may make sense to port it to C/Rust/etc and make it a loadable extension.

[1] https://github.com/mattn/go-sqlite3/pull/1109

for what it's worth, the two pool approach is suggested here by a collaborator to github.com/mattn/go-sqlite3: https://github.com/mattn/go-sqlite3/issues/1179#issuecomment...

SQLite is great. I've also recently settled on it as a key-value store, after considering a few purpose-built key-value solutions. Turns out that it's really easy to make SQLite work as a key-value store, but very difficult to make key-value stores relational.

Just be careful with `:memory:` databases. From the mattn/go-sqlite3 FAQ[1]:

> Each connection to ":memory:" opens a brand new in-memory sql database, so if the stdlib's sql engine happens to open another connection and you've only specified ":memory:", that connection will see a brand new database. A workaround is to use "file::memory:?cache=shared" (or "file:foobar?mode=memory&cache=shared"). Every connection to this string will point to the same in-memory database.

I noticed strange behaviors with just `:memory:` where tables would just disappear at random, and this workaround helped. Make sure to use a unique filename as the `file:` value, especially if using this in tests.

[1]: https://github.com/mattn/go-sqlite3#faq

github.com/mattn/go-sqlite3

For building my web server, I chose to use the Gin framework as the foundation of my app. It was incredibly easy to understand and work with, and I was pleasantly surprised by how seamlessly it integrated with writing unit tests for the server. To handle the database, I leveraged the power of go-sqlite and migrate for efficient SQL queries and migrations. These libraries proved to be both powerful and user-friendly, making the development process a breeze.

https://github.com/mattn/go-sqlite3/blob/master/_example/sim...

SQLite does have an optional "user authentication" extension, though I've not personally tried it out:

https://www.sqlite.org/src/doc/trunk/ext/userauth/user-auth....

The widely used Go SQLite library by mattn says it supports it, if that's useful:

https://github.com/mattn/go-sqlite3#user-authentication

I have an OSS project, sq which is a data-wrangling swiss-army knife for structured data. Think of it as jq for databases. It supports Postgres, SQLServer, MySQL and - relevantly - SQLite. It embeds SQLite via CGo and the mattn/go-sqlite3 driver.

IDE: use whatever make you productive. I personally use vscode. VCS: git, as golang communities use github heavily as base for many libraries. AFAIK Linter: use staticcheck for linting as it looks like mostly used linting tool in go, supported by many also. In Vscode it will be recommended once you install go plugin. Libraries/Framework: actually the standard libraries already included many things you need, decent enough for your day-to-day development cycles(e.g. `net/http`). But here are things for extra: - Struct fields validator: validator - Http server lib: chi router , httprouter , fasthttp (for non standard http implementations, but fast) - Web Framework: echo , gin , fiber , beego , etc - Http client lib: most already covered by stdlib(net/http), so you rarely need extra lib for this, but if you really need some are: resty - CLI: cobra - Config: godotenv , viper - DB Drivers: sqlx , postgre , sqlite , mysql - nosql: redis , mongodb , elasticsearch - ORM: gorm , entgo , sqlc(codegen) - JS Transpiler: gopherjs - GUI: fyne - grpc: grpc - logging: zerolog - test: testify , gomock , dockertest - and many others you can find here