Network Usage by Command-Line Tools

Generally command-line tools connect only to the database host. But there are two exceptions:

  1. When the command-line tool starts, it checks if its version is up to date. Details

  2. The edgedb server family of commands and edgedb self-update discover package versions and docker images and also invoke package managers and the docker engine to do index updates and related data.

Version check checks the current version of command-line tool by fetching https://packages.edgedb.com/.jsonindexes/*.json.

Here is how such a request looks like:

GET /archive/.jsonindexes/linux-x86_64.json HTTP/1.1
host: packages.edgedb.com
content-length: 0
user-agent: edgedb

The User-Agent header only specifies that request is done by edgedb command-line tool (without version number). The platform, architecture and whether nightly is used can be devised from the URL of the query.

Latest version number is cached for the random duration from 16 to 32 hours (this randomization is done both for spreading the load and for better anonymizing the data). A failure is cached for the random duration from 6 to 12 hours.

To disable version check do one of two things:

1. Use --no-version-check command-line parameter to disable just for this invocation 2. Export EDGEDB_NO_VERSION_CHECK=true in the environment.

To verify that check is skipped and no network access is being done logging facility can be used:

$ export RUST_LOG=edgedb::version_check=debug
$ edgedb --no-version-check
[..snip..] Skipping version check due to --no-version-check
edgedb>
$ EDGEDB_NO_VERSION_CHECK=true edgedb
[..snip..] Skipping version check due to EDGEDB_NO_VERSION_CHECK
edgedb>

Generally these commands do requests with exactly the headers like version check.

Data sources for the commands directly:

  1. Package indexes and packages at https://packages.edgedb.com

  2. Docker image index at https://registry.hub.docker.com

Data sources that can be used indirectly:

  1. Docker engine may fetch indexes and images. Currently the only images used are at Docker Hub. More specifically are edgedb/* and busybox (Docker’s official image).

  2. Package managers (currently apt-get, yum) can fetch indexes and install packages from https://packages.edgedb.com. And as we use generic commands (e.g. apt-get update) and system dependencies, package manager can fetch package indexes and package data from any sources listed in repositories configured in the system.

To avoid reaching these hosts, avoid using: edgedb server and edgedb self-update subcommands. These commands only simplify installation and maintenance of the installations. All EdgeDB features are available without using them.

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