Show HN: Private cloud shell history. Open source server for bashhub

I use the following found zsh function to log each each command to file by date. I've definitely found value in looking up less frequently used or complex commands.

# Custom history logging # From: http://blog.andrewhays.net/love-your-terminal # https://web.archive.org/web/20130525150720/http://blog.andre... function precmd() { if [ "$(id -u)" -ne 0 ]; then FULL_CMD_LOG="$HOME/.shlogs/zsh-history-$(date -u "+%Y-%m-%d").log" echo "$USER@`hostname`:`pwd` [$(date)] `\history -1`" >> ${FULL_CMD_LOG} fi }

I guess it's for people accessing multiple systems (perhaps ephemeral virtual machines) to have shared shell history.

I always find my history not complete when using tmux. I started using these functions in my profile to collect everything. I don't remember the source of the functions.

  log_bash_persistent_history()
  {
      [[
          $(history 1) =~ ^\ *[0-9]+\ +([^\ ]+\ [^\ ]+)\ +(.*)$
      ]]
      local date_part="${BASH_REMATCH[1]}"
      local command_part="${BASH_REMATCH[2]}"
      if [ "$command_part" != "$PERSISTENT_HISTORY_LAST" ]
      then
          echo $date_part "|" "$command_part" >> ~/.persistent_history
          export PERSISTENT_HISTORY_LAST="$command_part"
      fi
  }

  run_on_prompt_command()
  {
      log_bash_persistent_history
  }


  alias phgrep='cat ~/.persistent_history|grep --color'

I like the idea of a hub, as I do a lot of work inside docker containers and vms -- so this could be tailored to help me collect all my history.

Yes, the big benefit, to me at least, is being able to access bash or zsh history on multiple machines. I'll spin up a server for testing or to add workers to some job and it's really quick and convenient to install bashhub the new machine. I just wasn't comfortable using the open-source client to send all my shell history to a closed-source backend and wanted better command querying so I wrote the bashhub-server. If you're primarily working on one machine I'm not sure how beneficial it is if at all, but if you find yourself using ssh somewhat frequently it's really nice.

for me, yeah it is. for example i do various one offs for bid and proposal work; these probably should get nicely written up but they often get stuck if the B&P doesn't get accepted, but then a similar one comes up in 6 months, etc.

being able to see what directories i was in to run various analyses etc. is really invaluable. or even just how RESTful APIs were used (is it POST or PUT /api/v1/predict?) in various poorly documented stuff.

i also work across various machines, local laptop to powerful GPU node for training etc. so helps to have all that history in a nice central form. i'm just using zsh-histdb though which so far is fine for my needs.

To this point, is there an open source, encrypted data sync server? Some encrypted database I can connect to and query for data, that will also do deduplication, etc?

I'm imagining something like a shell history client storing the history on this database, with the server having no knowledge of any of the data, but the client still being able to easily sync it between devices.

I'm actually interested in people's opinions on this. I'm only returning commands with exit status 0 or 130. Not sure if what the best approach is.