piedesaint

Piedesaint

In short

Piedesaint is a minimal web server designed to expose directly files and directories (in [TAR](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tar_(computing) format for convenience) via HTTP or HTTPS.

Motivation

It was born out of the need of having the simplest web server possible (while still being reasonably fast and secure) to provide files and directories to be used by remote_file Chef resources, solving the issue of distributing packages that for different reasons might not be public or require some interaction to get downloaded, without requiring the installation of a full fledged web server.

It also serves directories (packaging them on the fly) as a single TAR resource.

This is useful in the case of using chef-zero (combined with Vagrant or Test Kitchen, for instance) when database backups/internal git repositories/installation packages need to be transported to the client node but adding those packages to our cookbooks is not desired or possible.

Installation

You can add this line to your application's Gemfile:

gem 'piedesaint'

And then execute:

$ bundle

Or install it yourself as:

$ gem install piedesaint

Usage

After installation you will need to initialize the configuration by executing:

$ sug init [list of folders to serve, in cascade order]

This creates the .piedesaint folder that you can inspect and configure (it contains a default shortlived and self-signed SSL key/certificate pair and some additional configuration in YAML format).

By default the configuration will serve the current directory, unless a list of folders is specified. If you want to serve a different folder or set of folders, just edit the configuration.

Host can be set via:

$ sug set_host [host IP]

This is useful/required so that the certificate is created with the correct IP and systems can validate it correctly.

After this, whenever you want to serve the files/directories, just execute:

$ sug

Alternatively, by editing .piedesaint/config, you can disable compressed folders (:tar: false), the need for Basic Authorization credentials (using an empty :username:) or the SSL behaviour (using an empty :key:).

License

MIT

Contributing

If you want to contribute:

1. Just fork this project.
2. Create your feature branch (git checkout -b my-new-feature).
3. Commit your changes (git commit -am 'Add some feature').
4. Push to the branch (git push origin my-new-feature).
5. Create new Pull Request.