7 ms·

Show HN: pbcopy/pbpaste across machines via Gitlab Snippets

55 points by bradwood 6y ago

StavrosK 6y ago
This looks great! If you want a bit more privacy, you can use https://pastery.net https://pastery.net, the snippets can be configured to expire in a few minutes and expired snippets are deleted from the database.
- imglorp 6y ago
  Symmetric encryption would be good too.
  - bradwood 6y ago
    It uses TLS over Gitlab's REST API and registers all snippets as private -- I figured this would probably be enough for a first cut.
- dewey 6y ago
  As it supports self-hosted Gitlab I'd guess that using that is even more privacy friendly than to send it to some pastebin website and trust that operation.
  - bradwood 6y ago
    This is actually the main use-case for this. At work we have machines in different environments, but they all can see the self-hosted gitlab (although not each other). This just makes it easier to get bits of config or scripts from one environment to another with not too much pain.
    - specialist 6y ago
      I do like the auto expire feature idea. (h/t StavrosK, pastery.net) I skimmed your glsnip project and didn't spot that feature. I get that your team self hosts gitlab. Very clever. Nicely done. Pretty much every place I've ever worked has struggled with secure, ad hoc, short-lived file transfers, both large and tiny. (eg Someone in marketing needs a data dump that's too large to sneak thru as an attachment via corporate email.) "virtual sneaker net" Often, we give up and just pass around a thumb drive. Ridiculous.
      - bradwood 6y ago
        I don't think Gitlab does auto expiring of snippets, but I was thinking of adding `glsnip purge` to wipe the "clipboard" -- I may yet add it. I also toyed with making some kind of a `clipit` style clipboard stack with pushing and popping and listing items on the clipboard and all that... I may add that too if there is interest...
spectaclepiece 6y ago
Copy paste across all my apple devices is perhaps the most underrated killer feature of the apple ecosystem. I just wish there was a way to extend that to my Linux desktop.
- flak48 6y ago
  KDE Connect can do it between Linux/Mac and Android. No iOS unfortunately which is what I think you were looking for. Not that it matters, but I think KDE Connect was available even before Apple's cross device copy paste
  - vanous 6y ago
    There is a GNOME and also Android implementation. https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/1319/gsconnect/ https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/1319/gsconnect/ https://f-droid.org/en/packages/org.kde.kdeconnect_tp https://f-droid.org/en/packages/org.kde.kdeconnect_tp
- xyst 6y ago
  If you are determined enough, you could probably recreate it. I am not too fond of committing my copied items to gitlab (even though it’s a private repo). The beauty of apples continuity feature is that the sync happens locally over Bluetooth/WiFi and secured by the Apple ID. Nothing is sent to a remote server, and each entry has a TTL.
- faitswulff 6y ago
  How do you do that - copy and paste across Apple devices, I mean?
  - dijit 6y ago
    it happens over bluetooth/wifi; on devices that are signed in with the same iCloud account. it's automatic.
  - Someone 6y ago
    You just use ordinary copy on one device and then ordinary paste on the other. https://support.apple.com/guide/mac-help/copy-and-paste-between-devices-mchl70368996/Macmillan https://support.apple.com/guide/mac-help/copy-and-paste-betw... “To use Universal Clipboard, your devices must meet Continuity system requirements. They must also have Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and Handoff turned on in System Preferences (on your Mac) and in Settings (on your iOS and iPadOS devices). You must be signed in with the same Apple ID on all your devices” System requirements more or less means “hardware is new enough” (https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204689; https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204689; I think the technical reason is that it requires a specific Bluetooth version and macOS/iOS version) Apple doesn’t say it, but I think the devices also must be on the same WiFi network and within Bluetooth range of each other. Edit: as a consequence, if you lend your iPad to somebody for a few minutes while working on stuff you don’t want them to know about, log out of your Apple account. Without it, they can paste whatever happens to be on your clipboard. Conversely, if you borrow someone else’s phone, don’t copy any secrets to the clipboard, even if you later replace that by something innocuous.
joshuaschmidt 6y ago
It would be really cool if you could always run the program in the background on both computers (systemd) and actually share clipboard content directly (as opposed to typing in cli). I might build that today if I find time.
- diveanon 6y ago
  You don't need to, just write a bash script and add it to PATH. This isn't open source, it's CS 101.
yarcob 6y ago
If the machines are on the same network I usually just do this on the receiving machine: nc -l 1234 | pbcopy And on the sending machine pbpaste | nc receiving-machine.local 1234 (where "receiving-machine.local" is the hostname or IP address of the machine you want to copy data to) nc (netcat) is installed on macOS by default, so this works everywhere without any configuration. It's unencrypted, but on my private LAN I don't worry about people snooping.
- koolba 6y ago
  Ha! I do the exact same thing. It’s also cross platform as well so great to hop between *nixes and say a Mac. Another trick to send a whole directory to a local machine with no SSH access in either direction is to pipe a tarball into base64, then transport the base64 data as text (via nc or clipboard). On the destination it’s just a “base64 -d” to restore it.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - Fnoord 6y ago
    Useful in CTF too ;-)
- jzelinskie 6y ago
  Doing tricks like this over a wireguard network adds to the magic; you get easy nat traversing, encrypted sharing with no intermediary servers.
waynecochran 6y ago
Very nice. I find myself using slack as by paste buffer by slacking messages to/from my self. This actually turns out to be useful for transferring large files between machines as well -- especially when one of them is behind a corporate firewall.
- diveanon 6y ago
  Don't do this. Slack has/will get hacked and you will either rotate your keys or not. I hope I don't use your services.
  - CameronNemo 6y ago
    He never said he was transferring keys or secrets though? I also use slack as a pastebuffer, but mostly just for links to documentation or articles.
  - waynecochran 6y ago
    Not doing this for anything that has security information...
  - Fnoord 6y ago
    You can delete the message afterwards (you can't do this automatically AFAIK). In Git, the secret will live on forever.
insomniacity 6y ago
This depends on Gitlab, but the author still can't bring themselves to host it on Gitlab? I love Gitlab, but that's not promising...
- bradwood 6y ago
  Odd you say that - I love Gitlab too! Most of my stuff is on Gitlab.com with syncs back to Github.com. This time I thought I'd try out Github Actions, hence the Github-first drop. I'll set up a Gitlab.com sync in a bit.
  - bradwood 6y ago
    https://gitlab.com/bradwood/glsnip https://gitlab.com/bradwood/glsnip
    - Fnoord 6y ago
      Nice. I still get 2 Cmd+F on Github though. One dotfile, other one being $ go get github.com/bradwood/glsnip I suppose $ go get gitlab.com/bradwood/glsnip would work fine? Seemed to work here.
- freedomben 6y ago
  I had the same thought. I love Git Lab and strongly believe it should be the default home if open source. It seems wrong to me that a proprietary product (GitHub) is where open source lives. That said, I also just GitHub because discoverability for a new project is terrible on GitLab because of the network effect. Even contributions, where people are more motivated to find and contribute, will drop 10x by moving to Git Lab. It sucks, but we have a hard chicken and egg problem here and I don't know how we fix it. It almost seems easier to convince Microsoft to open source GitHub than to convince millions of people to migrate in unison.
freedomben 6y ago
On Linux (where pbcopy and pbpaste apparently don't exist), I've been using a bash function `cb` (to copy clipboard) and `cbf` (to copy a file to a clipboard) for years. If you install xclip on your system and add this to your .bashrc you can get it too: https://gist.github.com/FreedomBen/8d4d0a89fd39c8b5a5c4d5dcfc8a7cf2 https://gist.github.com/FreedomBen/8d4d0a89fd39c8b5a5c4d5dcf... Luckily I added a link to where I got it, because I had long forgotten. Thanks Nathan! Nathan's blog post is excellent and should be read: https://madebynathan.com/2011/10/04/a-nicer-way-to-use-xclip/ https://madebynathan.com/2011/10/04/a-nicer-way-to-use-xclip...
- pubg 6y ago
  It's rather straightforward to create .bashrc aliases on Linux to transform xclip or xsel into pbcopy and pbpaste [0]: alias pbcopy='xclip -selection clipboard' alias pbpaste='xclip -selection clipboard -o' [0] https://superuser.com/a/288333/72342 https://superuser.com/a/288333/72342
drexlspivey 6y ago
You can do that with keybase. If you have the kbfs mounted just do `echo test >> /Volumes/keybase/private/<username>/clipboard.txt` and on the receiving machine you can see the text arriving with `tail -f /Volumes/keybase/private/<username>/clipboard.txt` And it's e2e ecrypted by default! You can use this to make a DIY encrypted chat app in a few lines. Just write to the respective folder which is implicitly there by default i.e `echo "Hello world" >> /keybase/private/alice,bob/chat.txt` and the files is automatically encrypted with alice and bob's keys
diveanon 6y ago
This forum is quickly losing relevancy for me. Bullshit articles about thing that can be accomplished with 2 lines of bash make the front page now? Just rebrand yourself as 20year-olds-read-hn-instead-of-the-docs.com and save my rss feed from the noise.
smivan 6y ago
This remind me of https://github.com/jedisct1/piknik https://github.com/jedisct1/piknik, except that's self hosted.
Glench 6y ago
You could also use PastePals, a copy/paste buffer-based social network @gklitt and I made for the Stupid Shit Hackathon: www.pastepals.club/

55 points by bradwood 6y ago

This looks great! If you want a bit more privacy, you can use https://pastery.net https://pastery.net, the snippets can be configured to expire in a few minutes and expired snippets are deleted from the database.

imglorp 6y ago
Symmetric encryption would be good too.
- bradwood 6y ago
  It uses TLS over Gitlab's REST API and registers all snippets as private -- I figured this would probably be enough for a first cut.
dewey 6y ago
As it supports self-hosted Gitlab I'd guess that using that is even more privacy friendly than to send it to some pastebin website and trust that operation.
- bradwood 6y ago
  This is actually the main use-case for this. At work we have machines in different environments, but they all can see the self-hosted gitlab (although not each other). This just makes it easier to get bits of config or scripts from one environment to another with not too much pain.
  - specialist 6y ago
    I do like the auto expire feature idea. (h/t StavrosK, pastery.net) I skimmed your glsnip project and didn't spot that feature. I get that your team self hosts gitlab. Very clever. Nicely done. Pretty much every place I've ever worked has struggled with secure, ad hoc, short-lived file transfers, both large and tiny. (eg Someone in marketing needs a data dump that's too large to sneak thru as an attachment via corporate email.) "virtual sneaker net" Often, we give up and just pass around a thumb drive. Ridiculous.
    - bradwood 6y ago
      I don't think Gitlab does auto expiring of snippets, but I was thinking of adding `glsnip purge` to wipe the "clipboard" -- I may yet add it. I also toyed with making some kind of a `clipit` style clipboard stack with pushing and popping and listing items on the clipboard and all that... I may add that too if there is interest...

spectaclepiece 6y ago

Copy paste across all my apple devices is perhaps the most underrated killer feature of the apple ecosystem. I just wish there was a way to extend that to my Linux desktop.

flak48 6y ago
KDE Connect can do it between Linux/Mac and Android. No iOS unfortunately which is what I think you were looking for. Not that it matters, but I think KDE Connect was available even before Apple's cross device copy paste
- vanous 6y ago
  There is a GNOME and also Android implementation. https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/1319/gsconnect/ https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/1319/gsconnect/ https://f-droid.org/en/packages/org.kde.kdeconnect_tp https://f-droid.org/en/packages/org.kde.kdeconnect_tp
xyst 6y ago
If you are determined enough, you could probably recreate it. I am not too fond of committing my copied items to gitlab (even though it’s a private repo). The beauty of apples continuity feature is that the sync happens locally over Bluetooth/WiFi and secured by the Apple ID. Nothing is sent to a remote server, and each entry has a TTL.
faitswulff 6y ago
How do you do that - copy and paste across Apple devices, I mean?
- dijit 6y ago
  it happens over bluetooth/wifi; on devices that are signed in with the same iCloud account. it's automatic.
- Someone 6y ago
  You just use ordinary copy on one device and then ordinary paste on the other. https://support.apple.com/guide/mac-help/copy-and-paste-between-devices-mchl70368996/Macmillan https://support.apple.com/guide/mac-help/copy-and-paste-betw... “To use Universal Clipboard, your devices must meet Continuity system requirements. They must also have Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and Handoff turned on in System Preferences (on your Mac) and in Settings (on your iOS and iPadOS devices). You must be signed in with the same Apple ID on all your devices” System requirements more or less means “hardware is new enough” (https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204689; https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204689; I think the technical reason is that it requires a specific Bluetooth version and macOS/iOS version) Apple doesn’t say it, but I think the devices also must be on the same WiFi network and within Bluetooth range of each other. Edit: as a consequence, if you lend your iPad to somebody for a few minutes while working on stuff you don’t want them to know about, log out of your Apple account. Without it, they can paste whatever happens to be on your clipboard. Conversely, if you borrow someone else’s phone, don’t copy any secrets to the clipboard, even if you later replace that by something innocuous.

joshuaschmidt 6y ago

It would be really cool if you could always run the program in the background on both computers (systemd) and actually share clipboard content directly (as opposed to typing in cli). I might build that today if I find time.

diveanon 6y ago
You don't need to, just write a bash script and add it to PATH. This isn't open source, it's CS 101.

yarcob 6y ago

If the machines are on the same network I usually just do this on the receiving machine: nc -l 1234 | pbcopy And on the sending machine pbpaste | nc receiving-machine.local 1234 (where "receiving-machine.local" is the hostname or IP address of the machine you want to copy data to) nc (netcat) is installed on macOS by default, so this works everywhere without any configuration. It's unencrypted, but on my private LAN I don't worry about people snooping.

koolba 6y ago
Ha! I do the exact same thing. It’s also cross platform as well so great to hop between *nixes and say a Mac. Another trick to send a whole directory to a local machine with no SSH access in either direction is to pipe a tarball into base64, then transport the base64 data as text (via nc or clipboard). On the destination it’s just a “base64 -d” to restore it.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- Fnoord 6y ago
  Useful in CTF too ;-)
jzelinskie 6y ago
Doing tricks like this over a wireguard network adds to the magic; you get easy nat traversing, encrypted sharing with no intermediary servers.

waynecochran 6y ago

Very nice. I find myself using slack as by paste buffer by slacking messages to/from my self. This actually turns out to be useful for transferring large files between machines as well -- especially when one of them is behind a corporate firewall.

diveanon 6y ago
Don't do this. Slack has/will get hacked and you will either rotate your keys or not. I hope I don't use your services.
- CameronNemo 6y ago
  He never said he was transferring keys or secrets though? I also use slack as a pastebuffer, but mostly just for links to documentation or articles.
- waynecochran 6y ago
  Not doing this for anything that has security information...
- Fnoord 6y ago
  You can delete the message afterwards (you can't do this automatically AFAIK). In Git, the secret will live on forever.

insomniacity 6y ago

This depends on Gitlab, but the author still can't bring themselves to host it on Gitlab? I love Gitlab, but that's not promising...

bradwood 6y ago
Odd you say that - I love Gitlab too! Most of my stuff is on Gitlab.com with syncs back to Github.com. This time I thought I'd try out Github Actions, hence the Github-first drop. I'll set up a Gitlab.com sync in a bit.
- bradwood 6y ago
  https://gitlab.com/bradwood/glsnip https://gitlab.com/bradwood/glsnip
  - Fnoord 6y ago
    Nice. I still get 2 Cmd+F on Github though. One dotfile, other one being $ go get github.com/bradwood/glsnip I suppose $ go get gitlab.com/bradwood/glsnip would work fine? Seemed to work here.
freedomben 6y ago
I had the same thought. I love Git Lab and strongly believe it should be the default home if open source. It seems wrong to me that a proprietary product (GitHub) is where open source lives. That said, I also just GitHub because discoverability for a new project is terrible on GitLab because of the network effect. Even contributions, where people are more motivated to find and contribute, will drop 10x by moving to Git Lab. It sucks, but we have a hard chicken and egg problem here and I don't know how we fix it. It almost seems easier to convince Microsoft to open source GitHub than to convince millions of people to migrate in unison.

freedomben 6y ago

On Linux (where pbcopy and pbpaste apparently don't exist), I've been using a bash function `cb` (to copy clipboard) and `cbf` (to copy a file to a clipboard) for years. If you install xclip on your system and add this to your .bashrc you can get it too: https://gist.github.com/FreedomBen/8d4d0a89fd39c8b5a5c4d5dcfc8a7cf2 https://gist.github.com/FreedomBen/8d4d0a89fd39c8b5a5c4d5dcf... Luckily I added a link to where I got it, because I had long forgotten. Thanks Nathan! Nathan's blog post is excellent and should be read: https://madebynathan.com/2011/10/04/a-nicer-way-to-use-xclip/ https://madebynathan.com/2011/10/04/a-nicer-way-to-use-xclip...

pubg 6y ago
It's rather straightforward to create .bashrc aliases on Linux to transform xclip or xsel into pbcopy and pbpaste [0]: alias pbcopy='xclip -selection clipboard' alias pbpaste='xclip -selection clipboard -o' [0] https://superuser.com/a/288333/72342 https://superuser.com/a/288333/72342

drexlspivey 6y ago

You can do that with keybase. If you have the kbfs mounted just do `echo test >> /Volumes/keybase/private/<username>/clipboard.txt` and on the receiving machine you can see the text arriving with `tail -f /Volumes/keybase/private/<username>/clipboard.txt` And it's e2e ecrypted by default! You can use this to make a DIY encrypted chat app in a few lines. Just write to the respective folder which is implicitly there by default i.e `echo "Hello world" >> /keybase/private/alice,bob/chat.txt` and the files is automatically encrypted with alice and bob's keys

diveanon 6y ago

This forum is quickly losing relevancy for me. Bullshit articles about thing that can be accomplished with 2 lines of bash make the front page now? Just rebrand yourself as 20year-olds-read-hn-instead-of-the-docs.com and save my rss feed from the noise.

smivan 6y ago

This remind me of https://github.com/jedisct1/piknik https://github.com/jedisct1/piknik, except that's self hosted.

Glench 6y ago

You could also use PastePals, a copy/paste buffer-based social network @gklitt and I made for the Stupid Shit Hackathon: www.pastepals.club/