hpr-knowledge-base/hpr_transcripts/hpr4142.txt

Episode: 4142
Title: HPR4142: A Shared Shell History With Atuin
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr4142/hpr4142.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-25 20:11:04

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This is Hacker Public Radio episode 4,142 for Tuesday the 18th of June 2024.
Today's show is entitled A Shared Shell History with a Toon.
It is the first show by Newhost M&W and is about 28 minutes long.
It carries a clean flag.
The summary is, install and set up Attu and A Utility to make your shell magical.
Hello, welcome to Hacker Public Radio, my name is Marcus and this is my first episode.
I have tried and stopped and started recording this at least a dozen times, so hopefully
this take is the last one.
I wanted to thank Hacker Public Radio for all of the shows that people have produced
over the years and shout out to Cedric DeVroy and Mining the Web, HPR 4135.
That one came out of the emergency queue and spurred me to go ahead and get an episode
submitted.
Today, we're talking about Attu-Wing or Attu-In set atuion.sh.
It's alpha tango uniform, indianovimber.sh, zero hotel, so that will be where you can
go to get the installation instructions, the documentation, all of that stuff.
So what is it?
What are we doing here?
Attu-Wing is at its heart a terminal history replacement, so instead of pressing up and
going through your shell history or grepping your output of your history command, instead
this is feeding all of your history into a SQLite database, and then you can do cool
things with it.
Besides recording what command was running, it also knows like what the exit status was.
You can configure this so that, hey, you know what, I only want my history to contain
successfully executed commands.
You can also have different filtering rules, so you could say, you know, I don't want
my history to ever contain my GitHub access token, or I would prefer not to have any
password stored in my history.
You can pre-configure that, and now your history doesn't have these potential security issues
going on.
That's one of the things that I think is cool.
You can also have a server running.
You can run it yourself.
You can also use the publicly available one, and this allows you to sync your history so
that you can be across on different devices and still kind of sync your history to those
different devices.
You can have different users, so the server supports many users, so you're not stuck with
just one user, one port, or something like that, and it's in to end and encrypted.
I'll get into that when we talk about syncing, but the encryption, good enough that I've
messed up a few times and had to just kind of blow it away and just lose some of my history
because of mistakes I made, which I guess is the sign of any good encryption project.
Oh, I lost that data because I encrypt it and couldn't decrypt it.
All right, so how do we install this?
It's pretty easy.
You can use the installation script off of their website.
You can install using Brue, Home Brue as the application.
You can also use Mac ports.
If you're on a Mac, Nix has a package, Pac-Man has a package, Termux and XBPS have packages.
You can also install from the source.
I have installed using Home Brue and using Cargo.
Of course, Cargo Install Attuines is pretty simple.
Coping a bash redirect from curl is also pretty easy.
If you do need a super user access, it'll prompt you for a pseudo password.
That'll get you the client installed.
Once you have the client installed, I would kind of think about and ask yourself what
your goals are or what your use case is going to be.
If you don't plan on syncing this across to other servers, you're just going to run it
locally.
You're not going to have a system account or anything like that.
Then you're ready to go.
If you can edit the config file, it's going to be found under home slash dot config slash
attuines slash config dot t o m l, Tommel.
I always say Tommel.
I don't know if that's the way other people say it.
It's tango Oscar, Mike Lima, t o m l slash config dot Tommel.
If you go into that config file, you will find all your settings.
It's a nice little example config file.
So you can set like where your database path is, where your key is stored, the encryption
key is stored, whether or not you want you care US time.
And if your time zone should be defined, all that kind of stuff.
The big ones for me that I want to be sure and tell everyone about is style, the style
option.
You have auto full and compact.
I like compact.
The default is when you press up or you invoke it.
It takes up the whole screen fills up your whole screen shows you all the commands.
I didn't like that because a lot of times I'm using arm running commands in a context
of the other commands that are being run.
So I use style equals compact, but that's up to you.
Then there's in line height.
This is the maximum number of lines the interface should take up.
Zero will mean it'll be full screen.
I set it to 10, you can set it to whatever you'd like, but that's I usually do 10 lines
and then there's also the invert the UI option and it will put the search bar at the top
or the bottom of the of the screen when you start typing and this is just a personal preference.
I leave it as the default of false, but it's up to you.
This can be pretty nice.
If you're doing a full screen view, if I when I was doing full screen, I used to use
invert when I'm doing a compact view, I like it false, so that's just a personal preference
and check that out.
And there's one other one I wanted to mention, I'm just scrolling through the file here
to find it because here it is.
It's called enter underscore accept.
This it seems to be the number one big confusing thing for people when they first come in,
at least when I've searched around for different things people are asking questions about.
Enter underscore accept equals false is how I have it set up.
It's defaulted to true and what will happen is when you press up and you get your in
app to in and you can scroll through and search your options, well if you press enter, it's
going to just execute that command if enter accept equals true.
If if you want to edit the command once you've found the one you want to look at, if you
want to edit it, you press tab.
So if you set enter accept equals false, enter and tab kind of behave the same way.
So it's kind of, it depends on what your use case is, but for me, these were the big
ones.
Compact view and enter accept false.
Once you have those set, the rest are kind of, you can kind of fill, you read through
and decide what you want to do.
But anyway, I just wanted to be sure and mention that because it, it was quite a challenge
for me until I read the documentation and, and stop being hardheaded about it.
The issue or what I wanted to mention is if you're running this, if you want to run this
as a server, if you're going to have a server and you want to sync across multiple accounts
or multiple different hosts, then I like to go ahead and get the account setup before
I go through and start modifying my config file.
I like to be sure that all of the hosts have their configurations kind of all set up
beforehand.
And if you're going to have the server, you can do that.
It's just a personal preference.
You could do all the, you can do whatever order you want, but this is, no, this is my
approach.
Okay, so you've got your client installed.
Now you want to install the server where you're, you're thinking about, okay, it's time
to install the server.
Well, the server component, you're going to need a Postgres database, Postgres SQL, I
always say it funny.
In my head, you know, I don't know if you don't talk to people about this stuff all the
time, you end up saying it funny until you talk to someone.
So any Postgres or a Postgres SQL, you know what I mean, the Postgres database, you're
going to need one of those installed and your server is going to need to be able to access
it.
I was worried.
I was like, oh no, I only have this cheap VPS.
I'm paying $10 a year for how, how am I going to install this?
Well, don't worry.
In my H top, I am using, you know, when it's, when it's just kind of hanging out, I'm
sitting at 320 megs of active memory and I've got 100, I've got what, two gigs, two gigs
of RAM, two gigs of swap defined, and I'm only using 300, 300 megs of RAM.
So some people might argue I don't need to define swap, but hey, anyway, I just wanted
to mention that Postgres is running and it's just happy with two VCPUs and two gigs of
RAM.
It all depends on what your load is looking like.
You wouldn't want to open this up to your entire enterprise this way.
But all you do is, if you have Postgres installed, once you have that going, you want to
create an Atulane user and a database that's owned by that user.
The Atulane Server Setup Guide was written by Tessus, T-E-S-S-U-S, as well as with contributions
from MacSlow.
So shout out to those guys.
This document really, really helped me in getting this going.
So once you have a database user, then you create an OS user, so that once you create the
database, then you create an OS user, because that's what Postgres seems to like, is you
go ahead and create the user, and then that way you have a system user for your Postgres
user.
The document kind of walks you through how to set that up.
The big thing is that the guide has you making a few changes, so that your Atulane config
lives in ETC Atulane, and then it creates a custom log directory for you, and walks you
through creating a system D file.
All of this stuff is pretty cool, and if you haven't written a lot of system D stuff,
this is pretty low stakes, and is, I don't know, I like it.
I thought this was really good and helpful.
So when you run the server, one of the things to know is it does offer, it will listen on
a TCP port, and you can, if you really want to, set it up so that it's serving, and people
can just come to your server directly from the internet.
I would recommend that.
I like to, but I'm also kind of lazy.
So what I have ended up doing is using a reverse proxy, and it's also defined in the guide.
Now if you're using the guide itself includes a reverse proxy for Apache.
For me, I, it was using engine X, so I used a different, it's very similar, but it's,
you can't just copy and paste from the guide if you're using engine X.
Let's see.
It's engine X, sites, enables, actuane, all right, let's see what we did.
The big thing here is, or I guess my big tip for everyone is I could not get the server
to work off of a, off of a path, like a, like the documentation of the guide says,
proxy password slash actuane to your local host on the port that you're running on.
But for me, I found that that kept failing or wouldn't log in was giving me errors.
So instead, I just set up a subdomain.
I said actuane.domainname.com, and then set up my VPS to be the target for that.
So the server name is actuane.domain.com, and then I use proxy pass to the port that
it's running on, and I proxy pass request headers is also on.
I usually turn off, like ignore, I usually ignore invalid headers and allow underscores
in headers.
Just, this is usually just my setup, I don't know if this is what anybody else does, or
if I'm opening myself up to being consumed by the, by the infinite darkness of the internet,
but that's just how I usually roll.
Once you have a config file though, then now you can use, if you've set up Lexin Crypt,
you can now use the certbot to go ahead and give yourself an SSL certificate.
Hooray, you are most of the way done.
At this point, I hope, if you've been following along at this point, you can, you have clients,
you have a client, at least one, that has actuane installed, but you haven't run any commands
or done anything with it yet.
If you wanted to have a server, you also have a server machine somewhere that you've installed,
the software, you've installed rest up, you've installed the application, and you've followed
the, how to set up an actuane server guide that the user's test is set up that's over
there on actuane, and, and Maxlo has, guy, we're going to get into Maxlo's contribution
here now.
Now that you've got that, it's time to, well, once you've got the server running, then
we can kind of get into configuring the client.
If you're running into errors with the, the, the actual like getting the system to work
or getting the application to work, the issues that I ran into that kind of to, to give
you tips on is make sure that the password that you have set up or that you think you
set up, you can try and log in as that, as that user, and check that it actually lets
you log in.
That can be a bit of a, that can be helpful.
You can use PSQL, that's Postgres SQL, so popusier, Quebec, Lima, PSQL, Space-D, like
it's hyphen, delta, minute quote, and then you can copy and paste that whole connection
string that you were using.
So Postgres, colon, slash slash actuane, colon, the password at 127.0.1.
Whatever your port is, slash actuane, 5432, I think it's the default, and then you can
just pass that along with the dash c, space quote, select space now, just a basic command.
But what you can do is that will let you know and make sure, hey, does my, does my user
can I use or log in?
Okay, great, my user can log in.
Next thing, how well, what's going on with my actually running it?
Well, if your service is running, then you can just use, you know, service atuane, status,
right, and then that will show you, sorry, I'm typing it now, so it's easier to do it
when you're typing.
You can type it, and if it's not running, it's going to tell you what it tried to run
and where it failed, right, and so there's the command that you can actually run.
So you can pseudo into that user and just try and run that command, or you can do, let
me see if I, if I did it in my history, pseudo dash, yeah, I, what I was doing was pseudo
dash, I, you, space atuane and then bash to even though, because when you set the user,
they don't have a shell or any account, but I usually, I like to just pseudo into atuane
and run bash, and then that was, that was my hacky way to get, get in and run the atuane
command, and that helped me figure out like, oh, are my user permissions wrong?
Or what am I doing wrong?
Sorry, that was, that was a long aside, but I wanted to be sure and get that out, because
that stuff killed me for a while.
So now we've got the server configured and it's running and life is beautiful, at least
in that component.
We want to go to our client and we're going to need to go through and set up our configuration.
Like I mentioned before, there are a few settings that I think are great that everybody should
go ahead and configure or use such as the, the compact mode and stuff like that.
Let me go ahead and just reiterate those, we'll grab the out of the config file, the style
compact inline height, being inline underscore height, you know, around 10 or so and enter
underscore except being set to false.
Those are the big convenience ones for me.
If you're running your own server though, you're going to want to go in and edit the sync
underscore address to match the address of your domain.
And you'll also, there's a lot of sync options, including auto sync equals true.
For me, I'm a big fan of auto sync equals true.
And then that will just go ahead and keep things synced up for you, but whenever you run
a command, okay, magical, all right, now I've got my configuration there, now you're going
to need to register.
The server guide tells you how to do that, the other documentation into the two, but this
is exceptionally important if you plan on running, at doing on multiple clients.
If you're going to be having two or three servers or one other server, whatever the case
is, if you're running on multiple hosts, you're going to want to be careful with this step.
You're going to create, you're going to log in and register an account on one server,
on one client.
So you're going to add to an register and you'll provide a username in your email.
Don't worry, you're giving yourself an email.
This is just another identifier and then you're providing a password.
Whenever you log in, you do the same thing yet.
You provide a username or you provide the username and the password.
And then it will ask you, please enter encryption key.
Well, I don't have one, just leave it blank to use the existing file.
So if you registered the account, press enter, that'll go ahead and use your key file that
was generated when you created the account.
Now once you do that, you have, this guy has the key, but you need to get this key to your
other host, okay?
So with that, you'll run Attuene Space Key and that'll spit out a bunch of words, a list
of words, right?
And that is going to be the nice user-friendly way to copy the key around or move it around.
I'm digging through my history real quick here to get it for you.
So tween dash, log in, all right.
So the way that I did this, you can do it different ways, I'm sure, but the way I did this was
I used Attuene Space Login, space hyphen u space the username, and then space dash k, like
for key.
And then I used it.
I did double quotes or a double inverted comma, I don't know.
The British have a different way of saying double quotes, but anyway, dash k, space quotes,
then that whole string of words, you know, because like for me, I won't give you the whole
thing.
I don't want you to copy my key, but it's like, it's like donor credits, sorry, congress,
host, onion, ethics, blah, it's a whole, it's a word soup, and then you just close quotes.
It's one to, I don't know, it's not a whole lot of words, it's long enough that it goes
off the edge of my terminal sometimes.
But anyway, you put that in and then it'll ask you for your password, you just go ahead
and type your password in.
And what you do that, now you're using the same encryption key on both hosts, and now
your history can sink across the different, different clients, and it's in and encrypted
to the server.
The server, on the server site, you've got the server running a server, you know, there's
a service running on the server, and you've got that going, but your user, your personal
user, your account, you know, whatever account you used to do other stuff on your VPS, you
can then log in to the server also, I used to edit your config and set it up.
In your config, you can change the server if you want, but for me, I left it so that
it was the exact same config on all of the clients that way, it was consistent, at
least the experience was consistent.
So yeah, those are kind of the, that's, once you do that, now all your new commands,
oh great, they're going to, they're going to sync up.
But if you want to get the old stuff, you'll want to use the command attwing space sync,
space stash f, that's going to send all of your commands, all of the commands that
attwing knows about up to the server, hmm, did we forget a step?
Yep, we did, we forgot to get your old history, maybe do you want to send your old history
up if you do, and I, I wanted to, then you'll want to import your existing history using
the import command, so you can say attwing import auto, or you can specify the shell attwing
import bash or attwing import and zsh, either way, that will go ahead and add your, your
attwing stuff, your history to attwing.
Now you can run the sync command, and that'll sync it to the server, and you can do that
on all the different, different clients, boom.
All commands you may want to run, attwing doctor will give you output that's useful if
you're going to do any bug reports or go to the forums or anywhere and ask for help.
You can also use attwing info, space info, and that'll show you where all your config
files are.
You can also edit the output format, there's a lot of customization options that I kind
of leave to you, I didn't really do a bunch of configuration with that.
I could tell you that there is a way, if your encryption keys get out of sync for some
reason, or if your encryption messes up, there's ways to purge it, but that's in the support
forum, there's a lot of discussion, there's help with that, so anyway, I just wanted to
be sure and throw it out there, hey, don't worry, it's possible to get it all fixed up.
Yeah, so that kind of nails down the whole process.
Once you've registered and synced, one thing that you can do that I think is fun is you
can run the command attwing space stats, STATs, that will give you the stats for the commands.
What command are you running the most frequently?
I use ls and vi way a lot, and then like pwd is down there, you know, it's still there,
but you can set like the top 10 or the top 20 commands you want, you can also pass in
a date, and it'll give you 24 hour range, all will tell you all, so you'd say stats,
let's see, like we'd say stats may 31, may 31, and then it'll tell me, hey, I used the
notify command, the ntf y is another project, I like a lot, but ntf y I ran that 17 times,
I ran the service command nine times, interesting, of course, that you can filter it out, so your
pseudo commands don't show up, or whatever you'd like, but I just, I think it's neat because
you can add this to your .zshrc or just your login or your motd, whatever, however you
want to deal with it, but you can have it so that when you log in, it's like, hey, these
are your stats from yesterday, and I always think that's fun, as long as it's not, I got
in trouble with winter, the weather in your terminal, because it's like, if you have
like eight, if you're running eight queries to this service, and then your network connections
down, you're going to have a hard time. Hopefully with this, though, the atoying will always
be available, so it's not going to cost you time, or there's not a risk of you hanging
like that. Well, I kind of ended up talking about this and going through the setup process
with you, like I would somebody I was talking to in real life, so I hope that wasn't annoying,
and I hope that 30 minutes isn't too long for an episode where we just kind of walk through
a process. I use this tool many times a day, and I think it's invaluable. There are
so many options and configuration choices that you can go through, and I just think it's
amazing. I'm just getting started, but since I didn't see anything in the hacker public
radio series or shows about atoying, I really wanted to mention it. Also, shout out to
Ellie Huckstable, who created the project, and well, that about wraps it up as far as
the things I know about atoying and what I wanted to share with everyone on hacker public
radio about atoying. I've been a listener for a long time, and so I appreciate getting
the chance to contribute.
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