Overview

Sandboxes provide a dynamic and isolated execution environment for data parsing, transformation, and analysis. They allow access to data without jeopardizing the integrity or performance of the processing infrastructure. This broadens the audience that the data can be exposed to and facilitates new uses of the data (i.e. debugging, monitoring, dynamic provisioning, SLA analysis, intrusion detection, ad-hoc reporting, etc.)

The Lua sandbox is a library allowing customized control over the Lua execution environment including functionality like global data preservation/restoration on shutdown/startup, output collection in textual or binary formats and an array of parsers for various data types (Nginx, Apache, Syslog, MySQL and many RFC grammars)

These libraries and utilities have been mostly extracted from Hindsight. The goal was to decouple the Heka/Hindsight functionality from any particular infrastructure and make it embeddable into any tool or language.

Features

small - memory requirements are as little as 8 KiB for a basic sandbox
fast - microsecond execution times
stateful - ability to resume where it left off after a restart/reboot
isolated - failures are contained and malfunctioning sandboxes are terminated. Containment is defined in terms of restriction to the operating system, file system, libraries, memory use, Lua instruction use, and output size.

Full Documentation

Installation

Prerequisites

C compiler (GCC 4.7+, Visual Studio 2013)
CMake (3.0+) - http://cmake.org/cmake/resources/software.html
Git http://git-scm.com/download

Optional (used for documentation)

Graphviz (2.28.0) - http://graphviz.org/Download..php
Doxygen (1.8.11+) - http://www.stack.nl/~dimitri/doxygen/download.html#latestsrc
gitbook (2.3) - https://www.gitbook.com/
lua (5.1) - https://www.lua.org/download.html

CMake Build Instructions

git clone https://github.com/mozilla-services/lua_sandbox.git
cd lua_sandbox
mkdir release
cd release

# UNIX
cmake -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=release ..
make

# Windows Visual Studio 2013
cmake -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=release -G "NMake Makefiles" ..
nmake

ctest
cpack -G TGZ # (DEB|RPM|ZIP)

Releases

The master branch is the current release and is considered stable at all times.
New versions can be released as frequently as every two weeks (our sprint cycle). The only exception would be for a high priority patch.
All active work is flagged with the sprint milestone and tracked in the project dashboard.
New releases occur the day after the sprint finishes.
- The version in the dev branch is updated
- The changes are merged into master
- A new tag is created

Contributions

All pull requests must be made against the dev branch, direct commits to master are not permitted.
All non trivial contributions should start with an issue being filed (if it is a new feature please propose your design/approach before doing any work as not all feature requests are accepted).