pipelight/boulette: Prevents you from accidentally shutting down remote hosts!

It’s late.

You finish your night coding session by typing shutdown -h now in a terminal.

But nothing happens.

Because it’s the wrong terminal.

And suddenly your production server is unreachable.

Protect you from yourself.
Hop on the boulette train!

Boulette prevents you from accidentally shutting down remote hosts
by raising a warning prompt on dangerous commands.
The prompt simply asks for user confirmation,
and can also enforce a challenge resolution to decide whether to resume(or abort) the command.

Prefix a critical command with boulette and a confirmation prompt will show up.

boulette "shutdown -h now"

Create an alias to replace the command with the bouletteproof one.
See the Write aliases section.

And then safely use shutdown .

In order to execute the provided command you can choose between some challenges to be resolved:

• ask, which is the default (--challenge ask). You have to type ‘y’ or ‘n’ to resume commande execution.

  

• hostname, enable with --challenge hostname. You must type the host name to resume command execution.

  

• numbers, with --challenge numbers You must type a random 6 number sequence to resume command execution.

  

• characters, with --challenge chars You must type a random 6 character string (Lower case ‘a’ to ‘z’ [a-z]) to resume command execution.

  

Boulette confirmation prompt can be triggered inside ssh session only thanks to the --ssh-only option.

When aliasing a command with boulette , typing will execute transparently in a local terminal,
and will only raise a prompt when executed from inside an ssh session.

alias off='boulette "shutdown -h now"' --ssh-only

The idea is to enforce a prompt on your most dangerous commands.
We can do so by creating aliases of those commands
and prefixing them with boulette.

For example, setting the following alias,

alias off='boulette "shutdown -h now"' --ssh-only

will prompt you whenever you type shutdown -h now.

Here are the one-liners I use the most frequently.

alias off='boulette "shutdown -h now" --ssh-only --challenge hostname'
alias sus='boulette "systemctl suspend" --ssh-only --challenge hostname'
alias reboot='boulette reboot --ssh-only --challenge hostname'

You can also enable boulette on a command and its every subcommands.

Let’s say you want to protect yourself from shutdown command ant its
every options.
This way shutdown -r, shutdown -h now and others will also raise a warning prompt.

Create a shell function to wrap the command call.

shutdown () {
  boulette "shutdown $argv" --ssh-only --challenge hostname
}

function shutdown;
  boulette "shutdown $argv" --ssh-only --challenge hostname
end

with cargo:

cargo install --git https://github.com/pipelight/boulette

with nix(flakes):

nix-shell -p https://github.com/pipelight/boulette

You can display a usefull help message with minimal examples.

Greatly inspired by Molly-guard.