Majic

Majic provides a robust integration of libmagic for Elixir.

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.

It is a friendly fork of gen_magic featuring a (arguably) more robust C-code using erl_interface, built in pooling, unified/clean API, and an optional Plug.

This package is regulary tested on multiple platforms (Debian, macOS, Fedora, Alpine, FreeBSD) to ensure it'll work fine in any environment.

Installation

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

def deps do
  [
    {:majic, "~> 1.0"}
  ]
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) Majic process without reusing it as a daemon, or utilise a connection pool (such as Poolboy) in your application to run multiple persistent Majic processes.

To use Majic directly, you can use Majic.Once.perform/1:

iex(1)> Majic.perform(".", once: true)
{:ok,
 %Majic.Result{
   content: "directory",
   encoding: "binary",
   mime_type: "inode/directory"
 }}

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

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

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

See Majic.Result for details on the result provided.

Configuration

When using Majic.Server.start_link/1 to start a persistent server, or Majic.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:Majic.Server.option/0 for details.

Note :recycle_thresold is only useful if you are using a libmagic <5.29, where it was susceptible to memleaks (details]). In future versions of majic this option could be ignored.

Reloading / Altering databases

If you want majic to reload its database(s), run Majic.Server.reload(ref).

If you want to add or remove databases to a running server, you would have to run Majic.Server.reload(ref, databases) where databases being the same argument as database_patterns on start. Majic does not support adding/removing databases at runtime without a port reload.

Use Cases

Ad-Hoc Requests

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

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

Supervised Requests

The Server should be run under a supervisor which provides resiliency.

Here we run it under a supervisor in an application:

children =
  [
    # ...
    {Majic.Server, [name: YourApp.Majic]}
  ]

opts = [strategy: :one_for_one, name: YourApp.Supervisor]
Supervisor.start_link(children, opts)

Now we can ask it to inspect a file:

iex(2)> Majic.perform(Path.expand("~/.bash_history"), server: YourApp.Majic)
{:ok, %Majic.Result{mime_type: "text/plain", encoding: "us-ascii", content: "ASCII text"}}

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

Pool

For concurrency and resiliency, you may start the Majic.Pool. By default, it will start a Majic.Server worker per online scheduler:

You can add a pool in your application supervisor by adding it as a child:

children =
  [
    # ...
    {Majic.Pool, [name: YourApp.MajicPool, pool_size: 2]}
  ]

opts = [strategy: :one_for_one, name: YourApp.Supervisor]
Supervisor.start_link(children, opts)

And then you can use it with Majic.perform/2 with pool: YourApp.MajicPool option:

iex(1)> Majic.perform(Path.expand("~/.bash_history"), pool: YourApp.MajicPool)
{:ok, %Majic.Result{mime_type: "text/plain", encoding: "us-ascii", content: "ASCII text"}}

Use with Plug.Upload

If you use Plug or Phoenix, you may want to automatically verify the content type of every Plug.Upload. The Majic.Plug is there for this.

Enable it by using plug Majic.Plug, pool: YourApp.MajicPool in your pipeline or controller. Then, every Plug.Upload in conn.params is now verified. The filename is also altered with an extension matching its content-type.

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:

• Evadne Wu
  • Original gen_magic author.
• James Every
  • Enhanced Elixir Wrapper (based on GenServer)
  • Initial Hex packaging (v.0.22)
  • Soak Testing
• Matthias and Ced for helping the author with C oddities
• Hecate for laughing at aforementionned oddities
• majic for giving inspiration for the lib name (magic, majic, get it? hahaha..)