type: post date: 2019-01-09 slug: sparkleup title: Headless SparkleShare with sparkleup
Update: this is now a project you can use!
I found myself wanting a headless version of SparkleShare, and was stymied by the lack thereof. I wanted to keep some IRC and MUCK logs in a SparkleShare project, but I run my clients for those in a tmux session on a server. However, that server lives elsewhere, and has no X, so, alas, the usual SparkleShare clients were right out.
My solution was a combination of ones I’ve seen elsewhere, and I’m calling it sparkleup because…I dunno, it sounded fun. It looks like this:
sparkleup/
├── projects/
│ └── logs*
└── ssh*
logs.sh is a simple script to be run by cron, but before I get to that, a minor diversion into git land.
My ssh key on the server requires a password — as do all of mine — which makes interacting with SparkleShare programatically difficult. After all, if I just do dazzle link with my normal key, then every time I try to commit to the project, I’ll be asked for a password. I’m not scripting that.
The solution was to generate a new SSH key with no password and dazzle link that. However, since that key lives in ~/.ssh/sparkle, git won’t pick up on it by default, because SSH won’t pick up on it by default. Add to that the fact that you can’t select an SSH key for git to use and…bleh.
So the solution was two layered. First, I created a new ssh for git to use. sparkleup/ssh is a script to be passed to git with the GIT_SSH environment variable. It looks like:
#!/bin/bash
ssh -i ~/.ssh/sparkle $@
That lets me write a job that will, without any interaction from me, commit and push to a SparkleShare project. That’s one script per SparkleShare project I need to manage this way, each of which looks like:
#!/bin/bash
export GIT_SSH=/home/makyo/sparkleup/ssh
cd /home/makyo/logs
pwd
git add .
git commit -am "update from sparkleup"
git push origin master
Then I add a crontab line to run that daily (or however frequently I need to update the project):
# m h dom mon dow command
0 5 * * * /home/makyo/sparkleup/projects/logs
It’s not really the type of thing I can turn into a separate project, but maybe it helps someone out with similar problems!