GenMagic

GenMagic provides supervised and customisable access to libmagic using a supervised external process.

With this library, you can start an one-off process to run a single check, or run the process as a daemon if you expect to run many checks.

Installation

The package can be installed by adding gen_magic to your list of dependencies in mix.exs:

def deps do
  [
    {:gen_magic, "~> 1.0.0"}
  ]
end

You must also have libmagic installed locally with headers, alongside common compilation tools (i.e. build-essential). These can be acquired by apt-get, yum, brew, etc.

Compilation of the underlying C program is automatic and handled by elixir_make.

Usage

Depending on the use case, you may utilise a single (one-off) GenMagic process without reusing it as a daemon, or utilise a connection pool (such as Poolboy) in your application to run multiple persistent GenMagic processes.

To use GenMagic directly, you can use GenMagic.Helpers.perform_once/1:

iex(1)> GenMagic.Helpers.perform_once "."
{:ok,
 %GenMagic.Result{
   content: "directory",
   encoding: "binary",
   mime_type: "inode/directory"
 }}

To use the GenMagic server as a daemon, you can start it first, keep a reference, then feed messages to it as you require:

{:ok, pid} = GenMagic.Server.start_link([])
{:ok, result} = GenMagic.Server.perform(pid, path)

See GenMagic.Server.start_link/1 and t:GenMagic.Server.option/0 for more information on startup parameters.

See GenMagic.Result for details on the result provided.

Configuration

When using GenMagic.Server.start_link/1 to start a persistent server, or GenMagic.Helpers.perform_once/2 to run an ad-hoc request, you can override specific options to suit your use case.

Name	Default	Description
:startup_timeout	1000	Number of milliseconds to wait for client startup
:process_timeout	30000	Number of milliseconds to process each request
:recycle_threshold	10	Number of cycles before the C process is replaced
:database_patterns	[:default]	Databases to load

See t:GenMagic.Server.option/0 for details.

Use Cases

Ad-Hoc Requests

For ad-hoc requests, you can use the helper method GenMagic.Helpers.perform_once/2:

iex(1)> GenMagic.Helpers.perform_once(Path.join(File.cwd!(), "Makefile"))
{:ok,
 %GenMagic.Result{
   content: "makefile script, ASCII text",
   encoding: "us-ascii",
   mime_type: "text/x-makefile"
}}

Supervised Requests

The Server should be run under a pool which provides concurrency and resiliency.

Here we run it under a supervisor:

iex(1)> {:ok, pid} = Supervisor.start_link([{GenMagic.Server, name: :gen_magic}], strategy: :one_for_one)
{:ok, #PID<0.199.0>}

Now we can ask it to inspect a file:

iex(2)> GenMagic.Server.perform(:gen_magic, Path.expand("~/.bash_history"))
{:ok, [mime_type: "text/plain", encoding: "us-ascii", content: "ASCII text"]}

Note that in this case we have opted to use a named process.

Check Uploaded Files

If you use Phoenix, you can inspect the file from your controller:

def upload(conn, %{"upload" => %{path: path}}) do,
  {:ok, result} = GenMagic.Helpers.perform_once(:gen_magic, path)
  text(conn, "Received your file containing #{result.content}")
end

Obviously, it will be more ideal if you have wrapped GenMagic.Server in a pool such as Poolboy, to avoid constantly starting and stopping the underlying C program.

Notes

Soak Test

Run an endless cycle to prove that the program is resilient:

find /usr/share/ -name *png | xargs mix run test/soak.exs
find . -name *ex | xargs mix run test/soak.exs

Acknowledgements

During design and prototype development of this library, the Author has drawn inspiration from the following individuals, and therefore thanks all contributors for their generosity:

• Mr James Every
  • Enhanced Elixir Wrapper (based on GenServer)
  • Initial Hex packaging (v.0.22)
  • Soak Testing