slop.place

Ephemeral CI runners: one throwaway machine per job, for GitHub Actions, GitLab CI and Forgejo Actions, on any cloud.

All three forges solved the same problem and none of them the same way. GitHub hands out a config good for exactly one job. Forgejo hands out a runner that deletes itself. GitLab hands out a token that does neither and a registration it will never clean up. The fourth surprise came from OVHcloud: a create response with no creation time, which the reaper reads as a machine born in 1970 and long overdue for deletion. It would have emptied the account on its first pass.

docker run -v ./data:/data -p 8080:8080 \
  ghcr.io/slop-place/runnerforge

Screenshots and detail Read the source

Design and print labels on any NIIMBOT printer, from an iPhone, an iPad or a Mac. Built for teachers, and free in the way that means nothing is held back rather than the way that means an account.

The protocol is undocumented, so it was read off the wire: framing, checksums, seven per-model print flows. The label size is the part that is not on the wire at all — it is written on the roll’s RFID tag and the printer keeps it, which is why the vendor app asks their server for it. This one has no server, so it learns the roll from the first thing you print on it.

The stock is wider than the head that prints on it. A B1 is sold with 50 mm labels and covers 48, and getting that wrong meant the app refused to print the roll in its own box. The first measurement of where the printhead sits was wrong too, and the answer turned out to be a roll sitting crooked in the machine.

git clone https://github.com/slop-place/betterniim
swift test

Read the source The protocol notes

A Terraform provider for Mattermost — teams and channels, users, bots and their tokens, webhooks and slash commands, permission schemes, groups, and the system configuration.

The configuration has several hundred settings across four dozen sections, so the resource takes the ones you want as a JSON document and manages exactly those, restoring what it found on destroy. Writing it turned up twenty-nine places where Mattermost accepts something and quietly does nothing with it: a team's contact address, a user's verified flag, a token's expiry. The last one matters — asking for a token that expires and getting a permanent one is not a difference to discover later — so the provider checks what came back and fails.

Guests can be invited with a magic link — a mail that signs them in without a password. Mattermost asks for that with a query parameter its own Go client does not pass, so calling the obvious method sends an ordinary signup link instead and tells you nothing. The provider builds that request itself. Proving it works meant putting a mail catcher in the test stack: the link exists only inside the email, and a test that trusted the API's 200 would pass either way.

terraform {
  required_providers {
    mattermost = {
      source  = "slop-place/mattermost"
      version = "~> 0.1"
    }
  }
}

Read the source Where the API disagrees with its docs

A Terraform provider covering the whole of the Freshdesk API v2 — agents, groups, tickets, fields, SLA policies, automations, the knowledge base and the forums.

Writing it turned up twelve places where Freshdesk's API disagrees with Freshdesk's documentation: field writes that 404 on the documented path, IDs that arrive quoted on some endpoints and bare on others, a choices attribute with five different shapes, endpoints that answer 405 to the delete their own docs describe. Each one is handled, and named in the README.

terraform {
  required_providers {
    freshdesk = {
      source  = "slop-place/freshdesk"
      version = "~> 0.1"
    }
  }
}

Read the source Registry

The spec is read, not recalled

The API reference is scraped and parsed before a line is written, and a coverage script checks the client against that inventory on every build. A missing endpoint fails CI.

It runs against the real thing

Every resource is exercised through create, refresh, update, import and destroy on a live account. That is how the twelve documentation bugs were found; a mock would have agreed with the docs.

Nothing is hidden

Where the API cannot do something — no delete on an SLA policy, a body the server rewrites — the provider says so in its own docs and warns at plan time rather than pretending.