wireguard-tools VS nushell

Oh, this is cool. I'm a huge proponent of CLI tools supporting sensible JSON output, and things like https://github.com/WireGuard/wireguard-tools/blob/master/con... and PowerShell's |ConvertTo-Json are a huge part of my management/monitoring automation efforts.

But, unfortunately, sensible is doing some heavy lifting here and reality is... well, reality. While the output of things like the LSI/Broadcom StorCLI 'suffix the command with J' approach and some of PowerShell's COM-hiding wrappers (which are depressingly common) is technically JSON, the end result is so mindbogglingly complex-slash-useless, that you're quickly forced to revert to 'OK, just run some regexes on the plain-text output' kludges anyway.

Having said that, I'll definitely check this out. If the first example given, parsing dig output, is indeed representative of what this can reliably do, it should be interesting...

> Possible? Maybe. Easy? No. Especially the “testable” part.

a testable shell script? Never seen one.

Thinking about scirpts I've read in the past, I remember seeing Jason Donenfeld's bash script for wireguard-wg and thinking how productive and readable it was,

https://github.com/WireGuard/wireguard-tools/blob/master/src...

I see this when my equipment roams back into my private network and the wireguard server is inside that LAN. It can be solved by NAT'ing packets arriving on your edge router's inside interface, destinated to your outside IP, back to the inside wireguard server IP.

Alternatively if your client is Linux, there is:

https://github.com/WireGuard/wireguard-tools/tree/master/con...

you have a copy here that you can edit: https://github.com/WireGuard/wireguard-tools/blob/master/contrib/reresolve-dns/reresolve-dns.sh

You could adapt this script for it. What this one does is re-resolve the domain of the endpoint for when it's a dynamic dns. You run it on a timer from cron, and when your dynamic dns changes it will update the endpoint IP with wg set. You could adapt this script to update your AllowedIPs instead of the endpoint.

I found the GitHub Repository to wireguard-tools however, I cannot read the exact commands required to connect to a certain VPN! I've created a .conf file and was wondering how you could use that with WireGuard-tools to establish a VPN tunnel to my network?

The first method is through downloading the pre-built binaries. With this method, you don't need to install anything other than Nushell's dependencies. Once you've downloaded the binaries, add them to your system's environment path to run it directly in your terminal.

I rather nushell for this purpose, it's more fun to write and easier to read.

https://www.nushell.sh/

These are just three small examples of what this shell written in Rust allows. The features are many and many more, but I'll leave it up to you to discover and enjoy them; I'm currently playing around with it and it's giving me a lot of satisfaction and immediacy, now it has a fixed place among the tools I use when working! The project is Open Source, so if you want to contribute, I invite you, as always, to do so, I leave you the link to the repo here!

Any thoughts on fish as compared to nushell [0]? It's similar to PowerShell in its philosophy and is also written in Rust.

[0] https://github.com/nushell/nushell

> In PowerShell, structured output is the default and it seems to work very well.

PowerShell goes a step beyond JSON, by supporting actual mutable objects. So instead of just passing through structured data, you effectively pass around opaque objects that allow you to go back to earlier pipeline stages, and invoke methods, if I understand correctly: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/powershell/module/microsof....

I'm rather fond of wrappers like jc and libxo, and experimental shells like https://www.nushell.sh/. These still focus on passing data, not objects with executable methods. On some level, I find this comfortable: Structured data still feels pretty Unix-like, if that makes sense? If I want actual objects, then it's probably time to fire up Python or Ruby.

Knowing when to switch from a shell script to a full-fledged programming language is important, even if your shell is basically awesome and has good programming features.

Maybe if the "popular" shells, but http://www.nushell.sh/ is looking better and better

Yeah agreed, especially now that PowerShell is available cross-platform.

Nushell[1] also seems like a promising alternative, but I haven’t had a chance to play with it yet.

[1]: https://www.nushell.sh/

I also discovered an existing discussion[1] related to this topic which includes a link[2] to a "helper to call nushell nuon/json/yaml commands from bash/fish/zsh" and a comment[3] that the current nushell dev focus is "on getting the experience inside nushell right and [we] probably won't be able to dedicate design time to get the interface of native Nu commands with an outside POSIX shell right and stable.".

[0] https://gitlab.com/RancidBacon/notes_public/-/blob/main/note...

[1] "Expose some commands to external world #6554": https://github.com/nushell/nushell/issues/6554

[2] https://github.com/cruel-intentions/devshell-files/blob/mast...

[3] https://github.com/nushell/nushell/issues/6554#issuecomment-...