tempest

This repository contains an experimental replacement for Sandstorm. See the blog post.

Currently, most of the sandbox setup code is built, and tempest is capable of spawning sandstorm apps and plumbing http traffic to them from the outside, though some http features are not yet implemented.

Building

To build tempest, you will need:

• Go 1.20 or later
• tinygo
  • If the build complains about missing wasm-opt, you may also need to install the binaryen package.
• Standard C development tools (make, a C compiler, etc).
• The bpf_asm command, included in the linux kernel source tree.
• capnp (command line tool) version 0.8 or later.
• capnpc-go code generator plugin

bpf_asm is not packaged in all distributions; if your distro does not have a package for it, you can install it from source. You will additionally need bison and flex installed, and then you can run:

curl https://cdn.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/v6.x/linux-6.3.1.tar.xz > linux.tar.xz
tar -xvf linux.tar.xz
cd linux-*/tools/bpf
make bpf_asm
install -Dm755 -t /usr/local/bin/ bpf_asm

You will also need to separately check out the source for go-capnp:

mkdir ../deps
cd ../deps
git clone https://github.com/capnproto/go-capnp
cd -

Then, run the configure script and then make. The configure script accepts most of the same options as typical gnu packages. Additionally you will need to supply the paths to the repository checked out above via the --with-go-capnp flag.

Finally, it is possible to share grain & app storage with an existing Sandstorm installation. If you want to do this, you will need to specify the correct value for --localstatedir, and then see the next section on importing data from Sandstorm:

./configure \
    --with-go-capnp=../deps/go-capnp \
    --localstatedir=/opt/sandstorm/var
make

Then run make install to install tempest system wide.

If you do not want to share storage with Sandstorm, you can omit the --localstatedir flag.

In addition to the files used by sandstorm, tempest will create a couple extra things underneath that path, namely:

• an extra directory at sandstorm/mnt
• a sqlite3 database at sandstorm/sandstorm.sqlite3

Importing data from sandstorm

Tempest comes with a tool to import some data from a sandstorm installation's database; after running make, there will be an executable at _build/sandstorm-import-tool. On a typical sandstorm server you can export the contents of the database via:

mkdir ../sandstormexport
./_build/sandstorm-import-tool --snapshot-dir ../sandstormexport export

If your sandstorm installation is in a non-standard path or mongoDB is listening on a different port, you may have to supply additional options; see sandstorm-import-tool --help to see the full list.

You can then import the snapshot into tempest via:

./_build/sandstorm-import-tool --snapshot-dir ../sandstormexport import

For some development, it can be useful to export & import from sandstorm frequently. Therefore, we have a Makefile target for this:

sudo make export-import

...which will automate the above, using the default values to sandstorm-import-tool's flags. It will also destroy the old database and fix permissions on the new one.

Running

tempest should be run as the user and group chosen by the via the --user and --group flags to ./configure (by default both sandstorm). The easiest way to do this is to run as root:

sudo -u sandstorm -g sandstorm ./_build/tempest

Tempest can be configured via environment variables; see ./capnp/settings.capnp for full documentation and ./env.sh.example for an example.

Note that for environment variables to be picked up by tempest when run with sudo, you will have to pass the --preserve-env/-E flag:

sudo --preserve-env -u sandstorm -g sandstorm ./_build/tempest

For development purposes, the Makefile includes a dev target that will rebuild, reinstall, and then spawn tempest; simply run:

sudo --preserve-env make dev

Creating users

Out of the box, it is possible to login in via both email (if the SMTP_* enviornment variables are set) and "developer accounts," which are useful for testing. However, by default none of these accounts will have any rights on the server. To create a user with the authority to do interesting things, you can either:

• Import data from Sandstorm, per above. Users will have the same permissions they had in Sandstorm.
• Use the tempest-make-user command.

For the latter, run:

# for email users:
./_build/tempest-make-user --type email --id alice@example.com --role user
# for dev accounts:
./_build/tempest-make-user --type dev --id 'Alice Dev Admin' --role admin

Where role can be any of visitor, user, or admin, with the same meanings as in Sandstorm:

• visitors have the ability to list and interact with grains that have been shared with them, but otherwise have no authority on the server.
• users can additionally install apps and create grains.
• admins have full access to the server.

Using

Visit the web interface (as defined by BASE_URL), and log in either with a developer account or email.

Once you have logged in, the Grains link will display grains the user has access to. Click the links to open the grains.

This will display the grain's UI within an iframe. Things like offer iframes and anything that uses sandstorm specific APIs will not work currently.

If your account has at least the user role, the Apps link will allow you upload spk files to install apps, or create grains from apps which are already installed.