Category Archives: Open Source

Open Source, Free Software, and similar

cURL and libcurl, Mozilla

Mozilla’s search for a new logo

I’m employed by Mozilla. The same Mozilla that recently has announced that it is looking around for feedback on how to revamp its logo and graphical image.

It was with amusement I saw one of the existing suggestions for a new logo by using “://” (colon slash slash) the name:

mozilla-colon-slashslash-suggestion

… compared with the recently announced new curl logo:

good_curl_logo

Me being in both teams and being a general Internet protocol enthusiast I couldn’t be more happy if Mozilla would end up using a design so clearly based on the same underlying thoughts. After all,
Imitation is the sincerest of flattery as Charles Caleb Colton once so eloquently expressed it.

cURL and libcurl, Open Source, Windows

Removing the PowerShell curl alias?

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PowerShell is a spiced up command line shell made by Microsoft. According to some people, it is a really useful and good shell alternative.

Already a long time ago, we got bug reports from confused users who couldn’t use curl from their PowerShell prompts and it didn’t take long until we figured out that Microsoft had added aliases for both curl and wget. The alias had the shell instead invoke its own command called “Invoke-WebRequest” whenever curl or wget was entered. Invoke-WebRequest being PowerShell’s own version of a command line tool for fiddling with URLs.

Invoke-WebRequest is of course not anywhere near similar to neither curl nor wget and it doesn’t support any of the command line options or anything. The aliases really don’t help users. No user who would want the actual curl or wget is helped by these aliases, and users who don’t know about the real curl and wget won’t use the aliases. They were and remain pointless. But they’ve remained a thorn in my side ever since. Me knowing that they are there and confusing users every now and then – not me personally, since I’m not really a Windows guy.

Fast forward to modern days: Microsoft released PowerShell as open source on github yesterday. Without much further ado, I filed a Pull-Request, asking the aliases to be removed. It is a minuscule, 4 line patch. It took way longer to git clone the repo than to make the actual patch and submit the pull request!

It took 34 minutes for them to close the pull request:

“Those aliases have existed for multiple releases, so removing them would be a breaking change.”

To be honest, I didn’t expect them to merge it easily. I figure they added those aliases for a reason back in the day and it seems unlikely that I as an outsider would just make them change that decision just like this out of the blue.

But the story didn’t end there. Obviously more Microsoft people gave the PR some attention and more comments were added. Like this:

“You bring up a great point. We added a number of aliases for Unix commands but if someone has installed those commands on WIndows, those aliases screw them up.

We need to fix this.”

So, maybe it will trigger a change anyway? The story is ongoing…

cURL and libcurl, Open Source, Security, Technology

curl and h2 on mac

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$ curl ‐‐http2 https://daniel.haxx.se/
curl: (1) Unsupported protocol

curl on mac

curcurl-symboll has been shipped by default on Mac OS X since many years – I actually couldn’t even manage to figure out exactly how many. It is built and bundled with the operating system by Apple itself and on Apple’s own terms and even though I’m the main curl developer I’ve never discussed this with them or even been asked or told about their plans. I’m not complaining, our license allows this and I’m nothing but happy with them shipping curl to millions of Mac users.

Leaving OpenSSL

osxOriginally, curl on Mac was built against OpenSSL for the TLS and SSL support, but over time our friends at Apple have switched more and more of their software over to use their own TLS and crypto library Secure Transport instead of OpenSSL. A while ago Apple started bundling curl built to use the native mac TLS library instead of OpenSSL.

As you may know, when you build curl you can select from eleven different TLS libraries and one of them of course is Secure Transport. Support for this TLS back-end in curl was written by curl hackers, but it apparently got to a quality level good enough for Apple to decide to build curl with this back-end and ship it like that.

The Secure Transport back-end is rather capable and generally doesn’t cause many reasons for concern. There’s however one notable little glitch that people keep asking me about…

curl doesn’t support HTTP/2 on mac!

There are two obvious reasons why not, and they are:

1. No ALPN with Secure Transport

Secure Transport doesn’t offer any public API to enable HTTP/2 with ALPN when speaking HTTPS. Sure, we know Apple supports HTTP/2 already in several other aspects in their ecosystem and we can check their open code so we know there’s support for HTTP/2 and ALPN. There’s just no official APIs for us to use to switch it on!

So, if you insist on building curl to use Secure Transport instead of one of the many alternatives that actually support ALPN just fine, then you can’t negotiate HTTP/2 over TLS!

2. No nghttp2 with Mac OS

Even without ALPN support, you could actually still negotiate HTTP/2 over plain text TCP connections if you have a server that supports it. But even then curl depends on the awesome nghttp2 library to provide the frame level protocol encoding/decoding and more. If Apple would decide to enable HTTP/2 support for curl on Mac OS, they need to build it against nghttp2. I really think they should.

Homebrew and friends to the rescue!

Correct. You can still install your own separate curl binary (and libcurl library) from other sources, like for example Homebrew or Macports and they do offer versions built against other TLS back-ends and nghttp2 and then of course HTTP/2 works just fine with curl on mac.

Did I file a bug with Apple?

No, but I know for certain that there has been a bug report filed by someone else. Unfortunately it isn’t public so I can’t link nor browse it.

cURL and libcurl, Firefox, Mozilla, Web

A workshop Monday

http workshopI decided I’d show up a little early at the Sheraton as I’ve been handling the interactions with hotel locally here in Stockholm where the workshop will run for the coming three days. Things were on track, if we ignore how they got the wrong name of the workshop on the info screens in the lobby, instead saying “Haxx Ab”…

Mark welcomed us with a quick overview of what we’re here for and quick run-through of the rough planning for the days. Our schedule is deliberately loose and open to allow for changes and adaptations as we go along.

Patrick talked about the 1 1/2 years of HTTP/2 working in Firefox so far, and we discussed a lot around the numbers and telemetry. What do they mean and why do they look like this etc. HTTP/2 is now at 44% of all HTTPS requests and connections using HTTP/2 are used for more than 8 requests on median (compared to slightly over 1 in the HTTP/1 case). What’s almost not used at all? HTTP/2 server push, Alt-Svc and HTTP 308 responses. Patrick’s presentation triggered a lot of good discussions. His slides are here.

RTT distribution for Firefox running on desktop and mobile, from Patrick’s slide set:

rtt-dist

The lunch was lovely.

Vlad then continued to talk about experiences from implementing and providing server push at Cloudflare. It and the associated discussions helped emphasize that we need better help for users on how to use server push and there might be reasons for browsers to change how they are stored in the current “secondary cache”. Also, discussions around how to access pushed resources and get information about pushes from javascript were briefly touched on.

After a break with some sweets and coffee, Kazuho continued to describe cache digests and how this concept can help making servers do better or more accurate server pushes. Back to more discussions around push and what it actually solved, how much complexity it is worth and so on. I thought I could sense hesitation in the room on whether this is really something to proceed with.

We intend to have a set of lightning talks after lunch each day and we have already have twelve such suggested talks listed in the workshop wiki, but the discussions were so lively and extensive that we missed them today and we even had to postpone the last talk of today until tomorrow. I can already sense how these three days will not be enough for us to cover everything we have listed and planned…

We ended the evening with a great dinner sponsored by Mozilla. I’d say it was a great first day. I’m looking forward to day 2!

cURL and libcurl, Mozilla, Network, Web

HTTP Workshop 2016, day -1

http workshop The HTTP Workshop 2016 will take place in Stockholm starting tomorrow Monday, as I’ve mentioned before. Today we’ll start off slowly by having a few pre workshop drinks and say hello to old and new friends.

I did a casual count, and out of the 40 attendees coming, I believe slightly less than half are newcomers that didn’t attend the workshop last year. We’ll see browser people come, more independent HTTP implementers, CDN representatives, server and intermediary developers as well as some friends from large HTTP operators/sites. I personally view my attendance to be primarily with my curl hat on rather than my Firefox one. Firmly standing in the client side trenches anyway.

Visitors to Stockholm these days are also lucky enough to arrive when the weather is possibly as good as it can get here with the warmest period through the summer so far with lots of sun and really long bright summer days.

News this year includes the @http_workshop twitter account. If you have questions or concerns for HTTP workshoppers, do send them that way and they might get addressed or at least noticed.

I’ll try to take notes and post summaries of each workshop day here. Of course I will fully respect our conference rules about what to reveal or not.

stockholm castle and ship

cURL and libcurl, Network, Web

curl wants to QUIC

The interesting Google transfer protocol that is known as QUIC is being passed through the IETF grinding machines to hopefully end up with a proper “spec” that has been reviewed and agreed to by many peers and that will end up being a protocol that is thoroughly documented with a lot of protocol people’s consensus. Follow the IETF QUIC mailing list for all the action.

I’d like us to join the fun

Similarly to how we implemented HTTP/2 support early on for curl, I would like us to get “on the bandwagon” early for QUIC to be able to both aid the protocol development and serve as a testing tool for both the protocol and the server implementations but then also of course to get us a solid implementation for users who’d like a proper QUIC capable client for data transfers.

implementations

The current version (made entirely by Google and not the output of the work they’re now doing on it within the IETF) of the QUIC protocol is already being widely used as Chrome speaks it with Google’s services in preference to HTTP/2 and other protocol options. There exist only a few other implementations of QUIC outside of the official ones Google offers as open source. Caddy offers a separate server implementation for example.

the Google code base

For curl’s sake, it can’t use the Google code as a basis for a QUIC implementation since it is C++ and code used within the Chrome browser is really too entangled with the browser and its particular environment to become very good when converted into a library. There’s a libquic project doing exactly this.

for curl and others

The ideal way to implement QUIC for curl would be to create “nghttp2” alternative that does QUIC. An ngquic if you will! A library that handles the low level protocol fiddling, the binary framing etc. Done that way, a QUIC library could be used by more projects who’d like QUIC support and all people who’d like to see this protocol supported in those tools and libraries could join in and make it happen. Such a library would need to be written in plain C and be suitably licensed for it to be really interesting for curl use.

a needed QUIC library

I’m hoping my post here will inspire someone to get such a project going. I will not hesitate to join in and help it get somewhere! I haven’t started such a project myself because I think I already have enough projects on my plate so I fear I wouldn’t be a good leader or maintainer of a project like this. But of course, if nobody else will do it I will do it myself eventually. If I can think of a good name for it.

some wishes for such a library

  • Written in C, to offer the same level of portability as curl itself and to allow it to get used as extensions by other languages etc
  • FOSS-licensed suitably
  • It should preferably not “own” the socket but also work in-memory and to allow applications to do many parallel connections etc.
  • Non-blocking. It shouldn’t wait for things on its own but let the application do that.
  • Should probably offer both client and server functionality for maximum use.
  • What else?
cURL and libcurl

curl user survey results 2016

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The annual curl user poll was up 11 days from May 16 to and including May 27th, and it has taken me a while to summarize and put together everything into a single 21 page document with all the numbers and plenty of graphs.

Full 2016 survey analysis document

The conclusion I’ve drawn from it: “We’re not done yet”.

Here’s a bonus graph from the report, showing what TLS backends people are using with curl in 2016 and 2015:

curl-tlsbackends2-2016

Network, Open Source, Web

No websockets over HTTP/2

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There is no websockets for HTTP/2.

By this, I mean that there’s no way to negotiate or upgrade a connection to websockets over HTTP/2 like there is for HTTP/1.1 as expressed by RFC 6455. That spec details how a client can use Upgrade: in a HTTP/1.1 request to switch that connection into a websockets connection.

Note that websockets is not part of the HTTP/1 spec, it just uses a HTTP/1 protocol detail to switch an HTTP connection into a websockets connection. Websockets over HTTP/2 would similarly not be a part of the HTTP/2 specification but would be separate.

(As a side-note, that Upgrade: mechanism is the same mechanism a HTTP/1.1 connection can get upgraded to HTTP/2 if the server supports it – when not using HTTPS.)

chinese-socket

Draft

There’s was once a draft submitted that describes how websockets over HTTP/2 could’ve been done. It didn’t get any particular interest in the IETF HTTP working group back then and as far as I’ve seen, there has been very little general interest in any group to pick up this dropped ball and continue running. It just didn’t go any further.

This is important: the lack of websockets over HTTP/2 is because nobody has produced a spec (and implementations) to do websockets over HTTP/2. Those things don’t happen by themselves, they actually require a bunch of people and implementers to believe in the cause and work for it.

Websockets over HTTP/2 could of course have the benefit that it would only be one stream over the connection that could serve regular non-websockets traffic at the same time in many other streams, while websockets upgraded on a HTTP/1 connection uses the entire connection exclusively.

Instead

So what do users do instead of using websockets over HTTP/2? Well, there are several options. You probably either stick to HTTP/2, upgrade from HTTP/1, use Web push or go the WebRTC route!

If you really need to stick to websockets, then you simply have to upgrade to that from a HTTP/1 connection – just like before. Most people I’ve talked to that are stuck really hard on using websockets are app developers that basically only use a single connection anyway so doing that HTTP/1 or HTTP/2 makes no meaningful difference.

Sticking to HTTP/2 pretty much allows you to go back and use the long-polling tricks of the past before websockets was created. They were once rather bad since they would waste a connection and be error-prone since you’d have a connection that would sit idle most of the time. Doing this over HTTP/2 is much less of a problem since it’ll just be a single stream that won’t be used that much so it isn’t that much of a waste. Plus, the connection may very well be used by other streams so it will be less of a problem with idle connections getting killed by NATs or firewalls.

The Web Push API was brought by W3C during 2015 and is in many ways a more “webby” way of doing push than the much more manual and “raw” method that websockets is. If you use websockets mostly for push notifications, then this might be a more convenient choice.

Also introduced after websockets, is WebRTC. This is a technique introduced for communication between browsers, but it certainly provides an alternative to some of the things websockets were once used for.

Future

Websockets over HTTP/2 could still be done. The fact that it isn’t done just shows that there isn’t enough interest.

Non-TLS

Recall how browsers only speak HTTP/2 over TLS, while websockets can also be done over plain TCP. In fact, the only way to upgrade a HTTP connection to websockets is using the HTTP/1 Upgrade: header trick, and not the ALPN method for TLS that HTTP/2 uses to reduce the number of round-trips required.

If anyone would introduce websockets over HTTP/2, they would then probably only be possible to be made over TLS from within browsers.