DEV Community: Liam Barry

Automating PowerRuby installation

Liam Barry — Tue, 05 Mar 2019 17:43:46 +0000

I've been working with a client who has been using an older version of PowerRuby and has recently wanted to upgrade to PR CE2 (Community Edition 2.0).

For those that don't know what PowerRuby is, it's Ruby and Ruby on Rails built for the IBM i operating system. They compile Ruby and some gems specifically for use on IBM i.

You can see the PowerRuby website here
You can see PowerRuby guides and binaries on their GitHub page here

The first guide on the org explains that you need to download the save files and run the RSTLICPGM (restore licensed program) command manually - ew! In 2018, we got yum on IBM i to install packages like the Ruby runtime (Node.js, python, etc) automatically with the yum command. PowerRuby has not adopted this method which is very sad.

Of course, for this to work you will need make and curl which is available from the default IBM yum repository:

yum install curl.ppc64 make-gnu.ppc64

I wanted an easy way to get PowerRuby running on IBM i, so I went ahead and created a makefile to run all the commands required to install the PR licensed program from the web. This process will create the save files, download the contents and restore the programs with RSTLICPGM:

BIN_LIB=PR_TEST

all: download install

download:
    system "CRTLIB LIB($(BIN_LIB))"
    system "CRTSAVF FILE($(BIN_LIB)/PRUBY_BASE)"
    system "CRTSAVF FILE($(BIN_LIB)/PRUBY_0001)"
    system "CRTSAVF FILE($(BIN_LIB)/PRUBY_0006)"
    curl -L -k -o /QSYS.LIB/$(BIN_LIB).LIB/PRUBY_BASE.FILE https://github.com/PowerRuby/DE_train_01/releases/download/V2R0M0/pruby_base.savf
    curl -L -k -o /QSYS.LIB/$(BIN_LIB).LIB/PRUBY_0001.FILE https://github.com/PowerRuby/DE_train_01/releases/download/V2R0M0/pruby_0001.savf
    curl -L -k -o /QSYS.LIB/$(BIN_LIB).LIB/PRUBY_0006.FILE https://github.com/PowerRuby/DE_train_01/releases/download/V2R0M0/pruby_0006.savf

install:
    system "RSTLICPGM LICPGM(1PRUBY1) DEV(*SAVF) LNG(2924) SAVF($(BIN_LIB)/PRUBY_BASE)"
    system "RSTLICPGM LICPGM(1PRUBY1) DEV(*SAVF) LNG(2924) OPTION(1) SAVF($(BIN_LIB)/PRUBY_0001)"
    system "RSTLICPGM LICPGM(1PRUBY1) DEV(*SAVF) LNG(2924) OPTION(6) SAVF($(BIN_LIB)/PRUBY_0006)"

Then to install PowerRuby CE2 all the developer has to do is run make!

Optional extras

PowerRuby also provides a version the GCC compiler (8.2) which is what they use to compile PR CE2 and some of the gems provided. It's also needed if you want to compile 'native' gems.

gcc:
    -system "CRTSAVF FILE($(BIN_LIB)/PRUBY_0002)"
    curl -L -k -o /QSYS.LIB/$(BIN_LIB).LIB/PRUBY_0002.FILE https://github.com/PowerRuby/DE_train_02/releases/download/V2R0M0/pruby_0002.savf
    system "RSTLICPGM LICPGM(1PRUBY1) DEV(*SAVF) LNG(2924) OPTION(2) SAVF($(BIN_LIB)/PRUBY_0002)"

Using acme.sh & Let’s Encrypt on IBM i

Liam Barry — Tue, 05 Mar 2019 17:11:53 +0000

I recently deployed a Node.js application on IBM i and wanted to use Let’s Encrypt for our certificates. We ran into a few bumps along the way. This post is going to go over the process of installing acme.sh and actually generating certificates.

What is acme.sh

Acme.sh is an open-source shell script to automatically call out to Let’s Encrypt to generate a certificate for you to use in your application. The quote on the GitHub repository is “It's probably the easiest & smartest shell script to automatically issue & renew the free certificates from Let's Encrypt.”. The repo can be found at https://github.com/Neilpang/acme.sh/.

First things first, you should install acme.sh with an SSH shell. As a reminder:

You can start the SSH daemon with STRTCPSVR SERVER(*SSHD) on the 5250 command line.
You can then log into the IBM i using ssh user@youribmi from your machine terminal.
You will want to run these commands in the bash shell.

To install:

Clone the repo: git clone https://github.com/Neilpang/acme.sh.git
Run the install script:

cd acme.sh
./acme.sh --install --force
alias acme.sh=~/.acme.sh/acme.sh

To use acme.sh you also need to have your domain DNS settings set up to point to your IBM i.

Can not init api (error code: 77)

I was following some old slides Aaron Bartell had written when doing this. When I first tried to install a certificate, I was getting a libcurl error.

bash-4.2$ export CURL_CA_BUNDLE=~/certs/cacert.pem
bash-4.2$ acme.sh --issue -d website.com -w /mywebsite/public
Please refer to https://curl.haxx.se/libcurl/c/libcurl-errors.html for error code: 77
Can not init api.

I imagine I was getting this error because the file I am referencing (cacert.pem) did not exist. After some Googling, I found this GitHub issue on IbmiToolkit repository. There are two important notes on this thread.

“The certificate bundle in question is typically provided on Linux distributions by default, but this is naturally not the case for IBM i.” - great! /s
phpdave sharing this pseudocode about finding the local CA.

phpdave’s script actually contains an important link on line 19: http://curl.haxx.se/ca/cacert.pem. I thought: if I download this certificate and make curl use it then I wonder if it will solve my issue.

bash-4.2$ wget http://curl.haxx.se/ca/cacert.pem
bash-4.2$ export CURL_CA_BUNDLE=/home/USER/cacert.pem
bash-4.2$ acme.sh --issue -d website.com -w /mywebsite/public
[Thu Jan 24 15:04:02 EST 2019] Creating domain key
....

How Let’s Encrypt authenticates against your server

Notice in the ache.sh command, we include a URL to our website and a path to a public folder. We do this because acme.sh will

Create a directory in the public folder: /mywebsite/public/.well-known/acme-challenge
Create a random file in the acme-challenge folder with a secret key in it
Tell Let’s Encrypt to compare your key at website.com/.well-known/acme-challange/randomkey with the key from the acme.sh script
If it’s successful, then your keys will be generated.

This does mean that the “public” folder should be accessible on your web server. For example, if you were building a Node.js app with Express and it had this folder structure:

mywebsite/
    index.js
    node_modules/
    public/
        index.html

Your index.js would tell the web server that the public directory is for static files: app.use(express.static('public'))

So when acme.sh generates /mywebsite/public/.well-known/acme-challenge/randomkey, it will be accessible via website.com/.well-known/acme-challange/randomkey

Using the generated keys

If all is successful when you run acme.sh it should generate a key and certificate for you:

bash-4.2$ acme.sh --issue -d website.com -w /mywebsite/public/
…
Your cert is in  /home/USER/.acme.sh/website.com/website.com.cer
Your cert key is in  /home/USER/.acme.sh/website.com/website.com.key
The intermediate CA cert is in  /home/USER/.acme.sh/website.com/ca.cer
And the full chain certs is there:  /home/USER/.acme.sh/website.com/fullchain.cer

You can then copy these keys to a location where they’re useful to you: cp /home/USER/.acme.sh/website.com/ /mywebsite/letsencrypt. In your Node.js Express app, you can then reference the key and certificate when creating your HTTPS server:

var express = require('express');
var https = require('https');
var http = require('http');
var fs = require('fs');

// This line is from the Node.js HTTPS documentation.
var options = {
  key: fs.readFileSync(path.join('letsencrypt', 'website.com.key')),
  cert: fs.readFileSync(path.join('letsencrypt', 'website.com.cer'))
};

// Create a service (the app object is just a callback).
var app = express();

// Create an HTTP service.
http.createServer(app).listen(80);
// Create an HTTPS service identical to the HTTP service.
https.createServer(options, app).listen(443);

`ERR_SSL_VERSION_INTERFERENCE` in Chrome

I noticed when we got the certificates working in our app, the website wouldn’t load in Chrome with the ERR_SSL_VERSION_INTERFERENCE error. After some research (trusty Google!) it looked like Node.js 8 doesn’t support TLS 1.3 (as noted in the second paragraph here).

Luckily, we also have Node.js 10 on IBM i - so a simple uninstall of Node.js 8 and install of Node.js 10 (with yum of course!) we can get around this problem. You may also have to update some of your packages if you upgrade to Node.js 10.

Why I created an IDE

Liam Barry — Tue, 17 Apr 2018 20:04:12 +0000

Hi. I have been meaning to write a blog post like this for a while and thought it might be a cool idea for my first post on dev.to.

I have been creating an IDE for the last seven months. For the first few months it was closed source, now it is open-source and will remain that way.

Prereqs

First, let me answer why I created it. I am an open-source developer. I don't have a lot of money to purchase large enterprise tools. I am very thankful for Visual Studio Community, Eclipse, Jenkins, among other things. I am in an ecosystem which, when I started almost 4 years ago, didn't have a lot of open-source tech. The ecosystem is around the IBM i operating system - which has had many names, more notably AS/400. We only recently got access to a mainstream package manager (yum) and it's going to be great for companies that want to use open-source tools in their existing stack.

It's important to note that most of the development that is done for this OS is done on the platform itself. The operating system has it's own compilers for C, C++, COBOL and RPG (we call these ILE languages). While you can get compilers for C, C++ and COBOL that run on other operating system - you cannot for RPG. RPG is very platform specific and has language features which are tied to the operating system. There are a lot of industries running this OS and using RPG as their main development language.

'Local development' isn't really a thing because compilers do not exist for RPG outside of IBM i. The best thing for distributed development right now is developing inside of your /home/ directory, which has your 'local' git repo in it. This does mean that all development is done remotely when writing in an ILE language.

Development on IBM i

There are two mainstream development options for writing in an ILE language. Using Rational Developer for i (there is also Power and Z versions, all based on Eclipse) or using SEU. SEU is seriously outdated and does not let you use the latest language features in RPG.

It really is just a text editor with a prompt for RPG and CL development. I really do not want to spend much time even mentioning SEU, so if you want to see more check out this video.

If you're a development house that's using SEU and has been for years, moving to RDi (Rational Developer for i) is a haven. You finally get to experience what an IDE can offer. Content-assist, outline view, remote debugging - it even handles the EBCDIC conversions when editing. It really is such an upgrade.

There was a couple of performance issues I had with RDi and it was causing me to be unproductive at times. I guess it doesn't help that I was working with systems in a different continent. This made me feel unproductive.

What's next

I wanted something that I was productive in. Something that wouldn't slow me down. For a few weeks I was creating sample extensions for Visual Studio and VSCode to see if I could add the functionality to them to work with ILE languages. This included:

All remote development
Adding highlighting for languages (RPG, CL and COBOL)
Eventually adding content assist
Submitting remote compiles and retrieving the error listing

I had no luck with both because of the nature of IBM i - it has a different file system. On top of that, everything was remote and it wasn't working well with either environments - it meant creating new file explorers for the file system (that really didn't go down well in VSCode)

I always follow the idea to work with what you're good with. I am okay with C#, so I started writing an environment in C# to open source code and compile programs. This is what it first looked like, about 7 months ago:

On top of all that I wanted an open-source option for developing in an ILE language. While what I have created is not perfect, it has enough to learn RPG. It has achieved everything I wanted from it - good performance, not a memory hog and fast compile submissions.

It was first named Idle, but then realised that is also the name of the Python IDE. I renamed it to ILEditor and it has stuck.

I get the chance to speak about it at conferences at times. The great part is when people submit their ideas because then it helps the direction of the IDE too. It's using the GPLv3 licence and is using other open-source libraries to create the UI. I am very happy so far!

That's pretty much it. Hopefully you enjoyed reading about what I have made. Here's a couple of follow up links:

Thanks!