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Show HN: Textdb.dev – simple data sharing for fun projects
- erezsh 6y agoCool idea, nice implementation. But man, fix your README.md!
- bontaq 6y agoMade because I couldn't find a simple, no-sign-up service to sync a list of names for a command line tool. And resubmitted because yesterday I goofed and the curl commands listed didn't point to the right location, which really took the fun out of it. Favorite part of the project: trying out Phoenix's built in pub sub + live view (the live view subscribes to a data/:id topic, which the api write endpoint publishes to) to get that nice instant update on write if you have the data open in the browser without polling. It's also fun to see how fast it syncs multiple browser windows watching the same data when you edit it in one window. That's not useful, but I give it 1 "neat".
- chris_st 6y agoThat's pretty cool! Are you doing anything like rate-limiting to prevent abuse?
- bontaq 6y agoThanks 8), rate limiting is just the most basic of nginx configs to like, 10 requests / second / ip
- NetOpWibby 6y agoOh nice, that sounds simple enough.
- sreekotay 6y agoReally simple cool! One minor thing on the IP rate limiting side.... LOTS of mobile/cell users might end up NAT'ed behind a single IP. Just an FYI.
- blisseyGo 6y agoThat's a good point. How does one rate limit correctly in that case?
- lioeters 6y agoI don't think it's possible to correctly rate limit IPs behind NAT, at least with NGINX. > Note that IP addresses can be shared behind NAT devices, so limiting by IP address should be used judiciously. https://docs.nginx.com/nginx/admin-guide/security-controls/controlling-access-proxied-http/ https://docs.nginx.com/nginx/admin-guide/security-controls/c...
- anderspitman 6y agoRate limiting by data UUID might actually be pretty effective. I should add that to patchbay.pub.
- blisseyGo 6y agoThat might be an issue if someone is using it to deliver lets say settings json and multiple users try to request the file.
- sreekotay 6y agowellllll there's no GREAT answer. Usuallllllyyy this is why some lightweight authentication is a good idea? Some kind of TGT/token scheme, and then rate limit based on that? But does make it all a little less "just works"
- nickjj 6y agoHey, if you ever wanted to come on my podcast to talk about your tech stack (how it was developed, deployed, lessons learned, etc.) I'd love to have you on. There's a few Phoenix episodes out currently, but none are using Live View yet. It would be really fun to talk about how someone is using it in production. If you do, head over to https://runninginproduction.com/ https://runninginproduction.com/ and click the "become a guest" button on the top right to get the ball rolling.
- berkas1 6y agoHi, is the source code available? :) BTW, the front page's HTML seems to have a <head> and <body> inside another <body>.
- bontaq 6y agoSure, I just made it public over here: https://github.com/bontaq/textdb https://github.com/bontaq/textdb Yeah I'm not sure why it's doing that, v annoying though
- cocktailpeanuts 6y agoprobably you have a layout bug. it's wrapping a layout within a layout.
- bontaq 6y agoYep that was it, ty, it should be fixed now
- spery 6y agoManually editing data has a bug. If you click cancel it will still update the value.
- bontaq 6y agoThank you, fixed
- josefrichter 6y agoWhoever made this, I love you. I do a lot of prototyping in Framer, and this just make simple prototypes that communicate with one another hell of a lot easier!
- StavrosK 6y agoYou may also like this super simple MQ I wrote a while ago: https://www.stavros.io/posts/messaging-for-your-things/ https://www.stavros.io/posts/messaging-for-your-things/
- canada_dry 6y ago+1 A handy substitute for mqtt since it doesn't allow a simple http get/post method to set and query keys - something very useful with iot stuff!
- bontaq 6y agoHell yeah, I'm planning to keep it up for a good while and lemme know if something isn't working or you'd like a new feature. bontaq @ the google mail .com
- mhass 6y agoVery cool. Are you using just cowboy as a server or do you have nginx/Apache in front?
- bontaq 6y agonginx is in front, but it's just doing a proxy and setting some headers, so effectively cowboy's serving everything. So far it's doing a great job too, CPU is at 2%, 1Gb free ram of the 4Gb available, and a pretty constant 1Mbps outward, on the 20$/m digital ocean droplet. I may have jinxed it by saying this though.
- WrtCdEvrydy 6y agoThis is fancy...
- rendall 6y agoIs there a maximum file size limit?
- rendall 6y agoThis was answered here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23949917 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23949917 "There currently isn't, but it is intended for small amounts of data. Today or tomorrow I'll probably put a cap at 500Kb or so, which is still a heckload of data."
- known 6y agoSimilar service https://u.instacrypt.me/ https://u.instacrypt.me/
- mkoryak 6y agoNo, it's not. Your link is a message service that self destructs. OPs link is a storage service
- mkoryak 6y agoCan you add a link to your GitHub from the website? I usually star things instead of bookmarking and others probably do too.
- NetOpWibby 6y agohttps://github.com/bontaq/textdb https://github.com/bontaq/textdb
- unixfox 6y agoAlternative service except there is no live update: https://jsonbox.io/ https://jsonbox.io/
- gmemstr 6y agoIs there an upper limit to the amount of data that can be stored on an endpoint?
- bontaq 6y agoThere currently isn't, but it is intended for small amounts of data. Today or tomorrow I'll probably put a cap at 500Kb or so, which is still a heckload of data.
- ximm 6y agoThe HTML of the frontend is messed up (<head> is duplicated)
- bontaq 6y agoShould be fixed now 8)
- ximm 6y agoThis seems to be in a similar spirit to https://patchbay.pub/ https://patchbay.pub/. I love these small services, but I still don't have an idea how they can be scaled up: If you want to use them for anything serious you probably have to prevent abuse and comply to all kinds of regulations.
- bontaq 6y agoYeah they're nice and fun to build. I imagine if you wanted to, you'd run this behind a VPN at #corporation, which will be a huge pain to get approval for, but not that bad.
- anderspitman 6y agoI didn't design patchbay to scale. I think of it more as a hammer, or maybe a Swiss army knife. Things can be useful without scaling.
- miki123211 6y agoIt would be cool if it was possible to read the data not just by the ID, but also by the hash of the ID. That would let us serve stuff like version information and links to the latest version, without the fear that somebody is going to reverse engineer our app and replace the data with something malicious. We, as the app author, would have the full key, so we could read and write, whereas users would have nothing but the hash.
- bontaq 6y agoThat's a cool idea, I'd definitely like to add the ability to create a little store with more safety, and that totally works with the goal of simplicity. I'll give it a shot.
- TedDoesntTalk 6y agoIt's a cool idea, but the old anti-pattern about security through obscurity applies.
- bart__ 6y agoI never really understood this argument, obscurity add an obvious layer of protection, not impenetrable of course, but still valid. Why is this different than an API key for example?
- melq 6y agoSecurity through obscurity refers to relying upon keeping the details of the security mechanism secret. An API key itself is a secret, but the mechanism for how that key is generated and used is public knowledge. In fact, the reason the best security mechanisms used today are so robust is specifically because they are made public in the first place.
- gregmac 6y agoIf compromised, you can change an API key. The key is like a password, and keeping that secret is important. Where the "obscurity" aspect comes in, as an example, can be through the mechanism used to generate and validate that key. Let's say you decide you don't want to or can't store the keys, and don't want a full pki system (public/private keys or certificates), so go with: sha256(clientid + userid + "hardcoded secret"). Your security now 100% relies on no one knowing that algorithm. If someone figures it out, you need to release a new version of your software, invalidate ALL API keys, and for that effort you still haven't done anything to prevent the same thing happening again. A good test of this is: if someone has your source code, can they break your security mechanism? If yes, you're probably relying on security though obscurity. By contrast, if you're using asymmetric encryption to generate keys, it doesn't matter if someone knows that: if they don't have the private key, they can't do anything. (This leaves aside the issue of storing your private key or other secrets in source code, but I'd describe that as an operational failure rather than a fundamental design problem).
- TedDoesntTalk 6y agoWhat language is this? I visited https://www.phoenixframework.org/ https://www.phoenixframework.org/ and even watched a few minutes of a video but there's no mention of the programming language. I suppose the language is called Phoenix?
- detaro 6y agoIt's Elixir.
- TedDoesntTalk 6y agohuh. I would have thought https://www.phoenixframework.org/ https://www.phoenixframework.org/ would mention Elixir then.
- detaro 6y agoIt does in a few places, not very obvious though, especially if you might not know that "Elixir" is a programming language, agreed.
- dmitriid 6y agoElixir (on top if Erlang VM) - https://elixir-lang.org/ https://elixir-lang.org/ - https://www.erlang.org/ https://www.erlang.org/
- webmaven 6y agoVery cool! Do you have any sort of dashboard displaying stats for the service? Simple totals would be interesting, of course (size, # of buckets, # of edits, etc.), but I'd find histograms of edits etc. per bucket particularly fascinating.
- redm 6y agoI really like simple tools like this. Well done; I can see lots of uses for this, especially with the Serverless/Jamstack surge. I love the idea of Hashing and read/write keys mentioned in this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=miki123211 https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=miki123211 I also like the idea of batch requests so you can pul multiple keys at once, or set multiple keys at once. It seems better for everyone. My only concern is that a small portion of users will undoubtedly try to abuse this with high volumes or large objects, or both. Have you published any limits on value key size, value size, read/write limits for keys etc? It might be worth thinking about now before you have to shutdown users or shutdown the service due to cost. Congrats again!
- bontaq 6y agoThanks! So far the limits are about 500Kb, which is more than enough for what this service is intended for. The setting of multiple keys I'd have to think about, as it's already so easy to acquire multiple keys -- ie I don't think I'd be saving or making anything much faster by special handling for it. Pulling multiple keys is likewise, you're free to do it in an async all.
- jrott 6y agoThank you for making this it's super handy.
- bontaq 6y agoI see some of you are realizing that I haven't enforced any data url to be a UUID, good on you. I hope it opens up new neat things like https://textdb.dev/data/hello-hackernews https://textdb.dev/data/hello-hackernews or more creative ideas.
- ASVVVAD 6y agoThat's awesome! I was wondering if I had to go to https://textdb.dev https://textdb.dev using the browser to get an ID x)
- bontaq 6y agoNah it just gives you a more secret id, I'm happy to support people talking about apples at https://textdb.dev/data/apples https://textdb.dev/data/apples
- WA 6y agoWhat’s the purpose of the read-only link if it has the same UUID?
- bontaq 6y agoI just built it without a backfill, new data should have a full read-only hash -- I'll try to backfill the data tomorrow
- tannercollin 6y agoGreat work! I wrote something similar at: https://reg.t0.vc https://reg.t0.vc It's useful if you set up bash aliases like "push" and "pull" so you can quickly move snippets of text across servers.
- abathur 6y agoI'd already been pondering the paperclip-machine universe that could be created by a Twitter bot that just pipes tweets to bash and posts the output. Now it could just trawl Twitter for addresses at https://textdb.dev https://textdb.dev, and throw the contents through bash, post the result back to textdb, and tweet a new link... :]
- josefrichter 6y agoOne more question: Does the data expire?
- bontaq 6y agoNope, especially seeing the current usage / data size I think it's perfectly fine to hang around forever. I may eventually implement something to clean up data with no reads for > 1 month, but again so far it looks fine to leave things around.
- jwarren 6y agoI think this is really nice and smart. I would suggest left-aligning the text in the edit/view mode for a few reasons: 1) It's a bit easier to read for longer text sources 2) It makes writing/reading JSON/YAML/other data sources much easier 3) lists are much easier to parse
- bontaq 6y agoI have added an option in the data view to customize text alignment, thanks for the good idea