I tend to test my REST services using curl. Most of the time the JSON responses are not pretty-printed, which makes testing larger documents a pain. Copy pasting the results in online JSON formatters was really getting annoying. So I wrote a few lines of python to do that job for me. Note that this is a two-minute-hack and by no means very generic. It works for me, and with curl. The handling for Headers is especially eerie 😛 But maybe you will still find it useful.

Without further ado, here it is: https://github.com/exhuma/braindump/tree/master/jsonformat

Installation

or

Screenshot

I actually did not believe it’s this simple.

Creating the tunnel is as easy as typing:

Which can be improved with

See the man page on the details of the extra options.

This will open up port 1080 on your local machine, providing a SOCKS proxy (SOCKS5 if I’m right). You can then specify this in any application supporting SOCKS proxies. This includes Firefox and Chrome. With Firefox it’s straight-forward. You can find it in the usual proxy page in the settings.

For chrome it’s a bit more tricky. While you can specify a SOCKS proxy, it seems to ignore it. If you want to enable your tunnel, you have to run chrome with the following command-line flag:

(or use chrome. Whatever rocks your boat).

Once this is set up, what will happen is that your application/browser will send all requests to your locally running SSH instance. This in turn will forward it to the remote host, where the request will be sent out on the web. The response takes the inverse direction. As stated by linode, this is great if you’re on an untrustworthy network!

Sources:

• http://www.linode.com/wiki/index.php/SSH_Dynamic_Port_Forwarding
• man ssh

While cleaning up my build process using ‘closure’, I stumbled across plovr. After using it for only 20 minutes, I am convinced that this should be in the toolbox of *everyone* developing with the closure library!

While the documentation is still a bit sparse, you can have it set up in no time! There’s no need to regurgitate a basic setup example in this post. Everything necessary is readily availble over at http://plovr.com/!

In a previous post I’d shown a way to enable bash-completion for fabric tasks.

With later revisions of fabric, you can now organise tasks in submodules. The new update takes this into account.

The last hour or so I have been struggling with an “extern” definition using closurebuilder.py. When running the compiler manually, you specify externs like this:

So, naturally, my command looked like this:

However, this resulted in the following error:

My next step was to verify this by running the compiler manually. And it worked. So, without a doubt, it had something to do with closurebuilder.py. Suspecting a bug, I updated to the latest SVN revision. No luck. Still getting the same error.

So I dug into the code of closurebuilder, and the problem was obvious:

Each additional command-line flag --compiler_flags gets appended to a list. This list is then used as-is in the subprocess call. The subprocess API however expects each argument as a new item in the list. And technically --externs myexterns.js are two arguments. The first is --externs, the second is myexterns.js. The usual --compiler_flags="--compilation_level=ADVANCED_OPTIMIZATIONS" works because it is considered as one argument (it does not contain white-space).

So to get it working properly, you will have to modify the above line to the following:

Whether it makes sense to fix this inside closurebuilder.py is debatable. The arguments need to be passed as a list for security reasons (to be able to do proper shell escaping). Personally I don’t care that I have to specify my compiler flags in this wonky fashion. It’s in a makefile afterall…