Show HN: Clace – Platform for secure internal web applications

• clace

  10 72 9.5 Go

  Clace is a platform for hypermedia driven web tools. Clace makes self-hosting web-apps easy

  

• htmx

  565 32,656 9.6 JavaScript

  </> htmx - high power tools for HTML

  

- Have flexible deployment options, allowing for use by individuals and teams with appropriate authentication and authorization policies at the the platform level.

Technology: Clace is a single binary application, built in go, using sqlite for app metadata. Clace apps are written in Starlark [2], which gives a simple python based syntax. The API routes are defined to be Hypermedia first, each API specifies what HTML to return for a full page reload and what to return for a partial request from HTMX. Go HTML templates are used for the response. The starlark code runs in a sandbox, it can make external calls through plugins. The plugin boundary is used to enforce security policies[3]. This allows for policies like permit GET requests but not POST/DELETE, which are difficult to do with a container or jail based approach.

Clace bundles esbuild to allow importing javascript libraries as ESModules. TailwindCSS/DaisyUI watcher integration is supported, although many simple apps can use classless CSS libraries. The goal is to have a no build approach, the dev artifacts are checked into git and directly used for serving prod. Importing new ESM libraries or new TailwindCSS classes requires a one time setup operation, which runs automatically in dev mode. Other than that, most code changes do not need a build step. Content hash based file names with a virtual file system is used, similar to hashfs[4]. This allow for aggressive static content caching, even without a build step doing file renames. For deployment, certmagic[5] is used for automatic TLS certs. App routing is supported based on path and/or domain, allowing for deployment flexibility. The plan is to allow plugins to be loaded dynamically using go-plugin[6], currently two plugins are built into the server, exec for running CLI command and http for REST API calls. Building UI for CLI tools and backend for frontend type use-cases are supported currently.

https://github.com/claceio/clace/tree/main/examples/ has some simple sample apps (the _gen files are auto generated), the demo apps are running at https://demo.clace.io/

Ajay

[1]: https://htmx.org/

• InfluxDB

  www.influxdata.com sponsored

  Power Real-Time Data Analytics at Scale. Get real-time insights from all types of time series data with InfluxDB. Ingest, query, and analyze billions of data points in real-time with unbounded cardinality.

  

• starlark-go

  21 2,196 6.9 Go

  Starlark in Go: the Starlark configuration language, implemented in Go

  

• hashfs

  3 342 2.6 Go

  Implementation of io/fs.FS that appends SHA256 hashes to filenames to allow for aggressive HTTP caching.

• certmagic

  13 4,812 7.7 Go

  Automatic HTTPS for any Go program: fully-managed TLS certificate issuance and renewal

  

• go-plugin

  30 4,960 6.7 Go

  Golang plugin system over RPC.

  

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