pwmake

Yet Another Password Generator. This one has two selling points: It tries to be like another, existing (and, most probably, superior) password generator (pwgen). And, it is implemented in Go. Point one isn't that exciting, since it basically spells "So Why Did You Do It Again?", so it all comes down to point two: It is implemented in Go, and it is a vehicle to learn the language to me.

What would you need?

Go, of course. However, the simple way to just yell

# sudo apt-get install golang

on a Debian-derived system will probably deploy just a very old and outdated version of Go to your system. So: Don't Do That! In fact, if you have done so before, either uninstall the distributions Go with

# sudo apt-get remove golang golang-go

or just don't use it. Deploy the Go version from https://golang.org/dl/ for your system, and make sure to use that version by prefixing it to your path:

# export GOROOT=/usr/local/go
# export PATH=/usr/local/go/bin/go:$PATH
# which go
/usr/local/go/bin/go

For the time being, you should have a working make or rake installed to start building, but since Go comes with its own build system, you could as well figure out how the provided Makefile fires up the build and build using the Go-provided wrapper. Or write a script which does the same.

What is that application?

The application pwmake generates passwords. Nothing fancy right now, but maybe we throw in fancy stuff later. Basically, it creates a series of random numbers, maps them to a set of symbols (really just "characters" for now), strings them together and prints them out.

However, there's already one thing to learn here: The ultimative best passwords are generated in the most simply way. Anything which puts in structure (to remember them better) will weaken the password. Just sayin'.

What IDE should you use?

Well, lots of people would say vim. However, one very good alternative to using plain vim is IDEA, which is nice, friendly, powerful, and comes with a vim plugin. Even better, there is a nice Go plugin which makes life better for those who occasionally dip into Go.

What's with the Makefile and Rakefile?

These are purely decorative. The Go community feels they are done with make and surely don't like rake. However, I like the idea of building a statically linked version of this project with five key strokes, so it's still in here.