Setting up shell completion had nothing to do with the acquisition of one
platform, yet it was a command of mvt-ios and mvt-android, each
generating the script of the program it ran under only. Completion now
leaves the platform CLIs for mvt, which emits one script covering mvt,
mvt-ios and mvt-android, installed as a single file loaded when the shell
starts. Click names the completion function of each program after the
program, so the three scripts concatenate without colliding, and fish
takes the file in conf.d rather than one named after a single command.
With one script there is nothing left for the platform commands to
generate, so their completion command goes, and with it the banner
suppression which was keyed on the command name: mvt-ios and mvt-android
now print the banner for every command they have.
The long help line says which commands the completion covers, so a
short_help keeps "mvt --help" from truncating it.
Several MVT commands have nothing to do with the acquisition of one
platform, yet they were reachable only through mvt-ios and mvt-android.
Asking which version is installed or downloading the public indicators
meant picking one of the two platform commands arbitrarily, and each of
those tasks had to be written, documented and maintained twice.
Add a third console script, mvt, hosting the commands which belong to no
platform: version and download-iocs for now, with completion following
in a later commit.
Commands installed in the new mvt.cli_plugins entry-point group are
registered on mvt, and on mvt only, so that a command package chooses
the CLI each of its commands is added to: mvt.ios.cli_plugins for
mvt-ios, mvt.android.cli_plugins for mvt-android and mvt.cli_plugins for
mvt. A command wanted on both platform CLIs is registered in both
platform groups; no group adds a command to every CLI. The
MVT_CUSTOM_COMMANDS variable loads command files and folders into mvt
the way the platform variables already do for mvt-ios and mvt-android.
Run on its own, mvt prints the banner and its help instead of a usage
error. The help text reminds that the forensic analysis of an
acquisition runs through mvt-ios and mvt-android, so that the command
which knows nothing about acquisitions says where they are analysed.
version and download-iocs stay on mvt-ios and mvt-android for now, so
that no documented invocation stops working. They are to be dropped from
the platform CLIs in a later release, once mvt has been available long
enough for the change to be announced.
Unlike mvt-ios and mvt-android, which point at their subpackages, the
console script points at mvt.cli:main and the mvt package re-exports
nothing of it. Importing mvt has to stay cheap and free of side effects:
it is the package plugins import from, and pulling in Click, the CLI and
everything the commands import merely because something imported mvt
would work against that.
While here, give the version command of both platform CLIs the context
settings every other command already has, so that "mvt-ios version -h"
prints its help instead of failing on an unknown option.
A module declaring a dependency its command does not provide made
_ordered_modules() give up on the whole run, so a single wrong declaration
in a module scoped to several commands turned a forensic analysis into
zero executed modules with one warning to explain it.
Drop only the modules that cannot run: the one with the unavailable
dependency, and anything depending on it. Each gets its own warning naming
the module missing a dependency and the dependency it is missing, and the
remaining modules run in the same stable topological order as before. A
cycle in the dependency graph is still a programming error and still stops
the run.
A plugin with a settings class already names itself in `plugin_name`;
passing the name again to plugin_data_folder() repeats it and can drift.
Add a `data_folder()` class method on MVTPluginSettings which returns
plugin_data_folder() for the class's validated plugin name (works on the
class and on an instance); plugin_data_folder(name) stays as the function
underneath for plugins without a settings class.
Plugins had no sanctioned place to keep the data they persist, so the
plugin configuration documentation suggested a CACHE_FOLDER setting
defaulting to ~/.cache/example-plugin. That is a Linux convention which
is wrong on macOS, nothing expands or creates it, and it turns a path
into a setting a user can be asked to configure.
Add plugin_data_folder(), which returns the folder a plugin should use
for caches, downloaded artifacts, synchronization state or anything
else it writes to disk, and creates it if it is missing. The plugin
name is validated before anything is created, so a name holding a path
separator raises an error and leaves no folder behind, and calling the
function again returns the same folder with its contents untouched.
The folder sits under plugin-data rather than under the plugins folder
which holds the settings files. On macOS the configuration folder and
the data folder are the same directory, so reusing the plugins name
would leave each plugin's data folder in among the settings files.
Both the plugin-data folder and the folder of each plugin are created
with 0700 permissions. MVT is a forensic tool, and what a plugin keeps
there, such as API responses or sample metadata, is private by default.
The path is resolved on every call, as the configuration folder already
is, so it follows the current environment rather than whatever it was
when MVT was imported.
The documentation now points plugins at the helper, and the example
settings class carries a plain integer setting in place of its cache
folder.
Plugin packages need somewhere to keep their own settings, but MVT
rewrites its config.yaml with only the fields it knows about, so any
foreign section is dropped. Add MVTPluginSettings, a pydantic-settings
base class that gives each plugin its own file under the MVT config
folder and its own MVT_PLUGIN_<NAME>_ environment variable namespace.
Settings resolve from constructor arguments, then the environment, then
the plugin file, then the field defaults. Saving skips the values the
environment currently supplies, so credentials passed as environment
variables are not copied to disk, and writes through a private temporary
file so a settings file is never partially written or briefly readable
by other users.
The Development section holds more than one page and will grow further,
so give it its own directory. development.md becomes development/index.md,
which keeps its published URL, and the custom CLI command page moves
alongside it.
Update the nav, the cross-link between the two pages, and the README
link to the custom command documentation, which is now published at
/development/custom_commands/.
Donncha Ó Cearbhaill