In category: ← Communication / Custom Communication Systems

About Hawkpost

HawkPost is a web app that lets you create unique links that you can share with a person that desires to send you important information but doesn't know how to encrypt it. The message is encrypted in their browser and sent to your email address.

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Languages/Platforms/Technologies:

Python

Lincenses:

More about Hawkpost

Hawkpost

Hawkpost lets you create unique links that you can share with the person that desires to send you important information but doesn't know how to deal with PGP.

You can deploy your own server using the code from this repository or use the official server (that is running an exact copy of this repo) at https://hawkpost.co.

Rationale

For many web and mobile development studios, no matter how hard they try to secure their client secrets (passwords, API keys, etc), the weakest link resides on the client most of the times, specially when he's not a tech savvy person. This project tries to help minimize this issue on the communication between both parties.

The way it works is like this:

It fetches your public key.
When the box is open and the secrets submitted, all the content is encrypted on the client side.
The server then signs (experimental) the encrypted content.
Finally the server forwards it to your e-mail address.

Setting up a development environment

In this section you can find the steps to setup a minimal development environment on your machine.

Base requirements:

Python 3
Redis
PostgreSQL

On Linux

On a Debian based operating system execute the following steps, after cloning the repository:

Make sure you have pipenv installed. You can check this page for more information
Install the dependencies

$ pipenv install

Create the local postgreSQL database with your user and no password
Migrate the database

$ pipenv run python manage.py migrate

Generate stylesheet with gulp (installation instructions for gulp can be found here)

$ gulp build

Now you should be able to launch the server and its workers

$ pipenv run python manage.py runserver
$ pipenv run celery -A hawkpost worker --beat -l info

You can avoid pipenv run in every command if you first active the virtual environment with pipenv shell.

Using Docker

To use this approach you need to have Docker and Docker Compose installed. Please note that since this project uses version 2 of the Compose file format you may need to update your Docker and Docker Compose to their latest versions.

Installation instructions for every platform are available at the Docker Engine Documentation. If you use Linux you'll have to install Docker Compose manually.

After having the latest Docker and Docker Compose installed, make the folder that will hold the GPG public keys keyring:

$ mkdir -p gpg_home

Some environment variables need to be set so the application works properly. Copy the provided .env.sample and name it .env:

$ cp .env.sample .env

Since this setup assumes containers talk to each other some of the variables need to be set in order to point to the containers' names.

Edit .env and set the following variables to these values:

DB_HOST=db
DB_USER=hawkpost
DB_PASSWORD=hawkpost
REDIS_URL=redis://redis:6379/0

Don't forget to set the remaining variables as well.

After setting .env correctly, just run (you may need to sudo depending on your setup)

# Run the databases in detached mode to avoid seeing the logs
$ docker-compose up -d db redis

# Perform the migrations
# (using `--rm` to remove the temporary container afterwards)
$ docker-compose run --rm web pipenv run python manage.py migrate

# Run the web and celery containers
# (`docker-compose up` would log db and redis as well)
$ docker-compose up web celery

These commands

Run the db and the redis containers detached from the console, so we're not bothered by their logs while working on the application.
Perform the migrations using a temporary web container; it is removed afterwards.
Run the web and celery attached to the console.

The web container will reload on code changes.

You may access the application by opening http://<docker-network-ip> on your browser, which you can find by running (you may need to run this as root depending on your setup).

CID=$(docker ps | grep 'hawkpost_web' | cut -d ' ' -f 1)
docker inspect -f "{{ .NetworkSettings.Networks.hawkpost_default.Gateway }}" $CID

This IP won't change unless you remove every container and the corresponding network (manually), so you may alias it on your /etc/hosts (to something like hawkpost.test).

Note: This approach was not tested on OS X or Windows platforms, so the network feature may require additional steps.