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Network usage​

Generally command-line tools connect only to the database host with a few exceptions:

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

  2. The gel server family of commands and gel cli upgrade discover package versions and docker images and also invoke package managers and the docker engine to do index updates and related data.

  3. The CLI communicates with the Gel Cloud API to provide easy access to your Gel Cloud instances.

Version Check​

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

Here is how such a request looks like:

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

The User-Agent header only specifies that request is done by gel 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.

Disabling Version Check​

To disable version check do one of two things:

  1. Use --no-cli-update-check command-line parameter to disable just for this invocation

  2. Export GEL_RUN_VERSION_CHECK=never 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
$ gel --no-cli-update-check
[..snip..] Skipping version check due to --no-cli-update-check
gel>
$ GEL_RUN_VERSION_CHECK=never gel
[..snip..] Skipping version check due to GEL_RUN_VERSION_CHECK=never
gel>

"gel server" and "gel self upgrade"​

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.geldata.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 gel/* and busybox (Docker's official image).

  2. Package managers (currently apt-get, yum) can fetch indexes and install packages from https://packages.geldata.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: gel server and gel self upgrade subcommands. These commands only simplify installation and maintenance of the installations. All Gel features are available without using them.