3.7 KiB
hishtory: Better Shell Hishtory
hishtory
is a CLI tool to better manage your shell history. It hooks into your shell to store the commands you run along with metadata about those commands (what directory you ran it in, whether it succeeded or failed, how long it took, etc). This is all stored in a local SQLite DB, and then e2e encrypted while synced to local SQLite DBs running on all your other computers. All of this is easily queryable via the hishtory
CLI. This means from your laptop, you can easily find that complex bash pipeline you wrote on your server, and see the context in which you ran it.
hishtory
is written in Go and uses AES-GCM for end-to-end encrypting your hishtory entries while syncing them. The binary is reproducibly built and SLSA Level 3 to make it easy to verify you're getting the code contained in this repository.
Getting Started
To install hishtory
on your first machine:
curl -L -o hishtory https://api.hishtory.dev/download/hishtory-linux-amd64
# Optional: Verify the binarie's SLSA L3 attestations from https://api.hishtory.dev/download/hishtory-linux-amd64.intoto.jsonl
chmod +x hishtory
./hishtory install
At this point, hishtory
is already persisting your shell history. Give it a try with hishtory query
and see below for more details on the advanced query features.
Then to install hishtory
on your other computers, you need your secret key. Get this by running hishtory status
. Once you have it, you follow similar steps to install hishtory on your other computers:
curl -L -o hishtory https://api.hishtory.dev/download/hishtory-linux-amd64
# Optional: Verify the binarie's SLSA L3 attestations from https://api.hishtory.dev/download/hishtory-linux-amd64.intoto.jsonl
chmod +x hishtory
./hishtory install $SECRET_KEY
Now if you run hishtory query
on first computer, you can automatically see the commands you've run on all your other computers!
Features
Querying
hishtory query
is the main interface for searching through your shell history. See some below annotated queries:
Command | Explanation |
---|---|
hishtory query psql |
Find all commands containing psql |
hishtory query psql db.example.com |
Find all commands containing psql and db.example.com |
hishtory query docker hostname:my-server |
Find all commands containing docker that were run on the computer with hostname my-server |
hishtory query nano user:root |
Find all commands containing nano that were run as root |
hishtory query exit_code:127 |
Find all commands that exited with code 127 |
hishtory query service before:2022-02-01 |
Find all commands containing service run before February 1st 2022 |
hishtory query service after:2022-02-01 |
Find all commands containing service run after February 1st 2022 |
For true power users, you can query via SQL via sqlite3 ~/.hishtory/.hishtory.db
.
In addition, hishtory export
dumps all commands to stdout separated by a single line. This can be useful for certain advanced use cases.
Enable/Disable
If you want to temporarily turn on/off hishtory recording, you can do so via hishtory disable
(to turn off recording) and hishtory enable
(to turn on recording). You can check whether or not hishtory
is enabled via hishtory status
.
Updating
To update hishtory
to the latest version, just run hishtory update
to transparently download and apply the latest update.
Design
CLI
Syncing
Security
Pending Features
- zsh support
- mac support
- automatic test running in github actions
- support for filtering out items in a search query via
-foo
- support for verifying the attestations tied to updates