Dialog is sometimes ugly

[MCGallaspy]

I ran the command ./letsencrypt-auto certonly -d foo.com --test-cert on Ubuntu 14.04.3 and saw the following weird prompt:

The borders are misaligned/missing, and use unexpected characters.

[pde]

dialog seems to produce messed up output on some terminals. We haven't been able to work out why, or what to do about it.

[MCGallaspy]

I did a cursory poking around, seems like it might be a bug in zope.component? I'll take a closer look as time permits.

[pde]

That would be surprising. There's a zope.interface wrapper around all the dialog calls (in order to support the --text command line argument, for instance) but I'd be surprised if zope.component was modifying the calls out to the python dialog module.

[pde]

That interface is documented here. The dialog / ncurses implementation is here

[jpluimers]

There is a similar yast issue on opensuse (https://wiert.me/2016/06/09/tumbleweed-local-console-yast-linedrawing-characters-garbage-after-first-reboot/) for which the workaround is to run /bin/unicode_start once by any user.

[bmw]

Due to problems like this (as well as other motivating factors), we've completely removed dialog as a dependency of this project in favor of our text interface for our next release. With this in mind, I'm closing this issue.

[jpluimers]

Please post a reference to that new text interface in case other people need to find it after upgrading.

[pde]

@jpluimers not clear what you're asking for there, but essentially Certbot 0.10.0 is going to behave a lot like certbot -t did for version 0.9.3 and below.

[jpluimers]

Ah. I never noticed there is certbot -t as it's not in the certbot --help list.

I actually like the certbot -t UI. Maybe that is because I'm from the Infocom era (:

[pde]

I'm pretty sure -t was in the help output for 0.9.3 and below.

[jpluimers]

I just discovered I was still at the master branch on commit da3332c which displays itself as 0.9.3 but already has that part from the help removed.

I'm not enough of a git and github person to show that in a commit graph.

I just now did a , but since then I've done git fetch and git pull and it's the same: it shows version letsencrypt 0.9.3 but doesn't show the -t portion of the help:

# git status
On branch master
Your branch is up-to-date with 'origin/master'.
nothing to commit, working tree clean
# git rev-parse HEAD
da3332ccfaad08bd9dece68f5ae71308acb1d776
# ./certbot-auto --version
letsencrypt 0.9.3
# ./certbot-auto --help

  certbot-auto [SUBCOMMAND] [options] [-d domain] [-d domain] ...

Certbot can obtain and install HTTPS/TLS/SSL certificates.  By default,
it will attempt to use a webserver both for obtaining and installing the
cert. Major SUBCOMMANDS are:

  (default) run        Obtain & install a cert in your current webserver
  certonly             Obtain cert, but do not install it (aka "auth")
  install              Install a previously obtained cert in a server
  renew                Renew previously obtained certs that are near expiry
  revoke               Revoke a previously obtained certificate
  register             Perform tasks related to registering with the CA
  rollback             Rollback server configuration changes made during install
  config_changes       Show changes made to server config during installation
  plugins              Display information about installed plugins

Choice of server plugins for obtaining and installing cert:

  --apache          Use the Apache plugin for authentication & installation
  --standalone      Run a standalone webserver for authentication
  --nginx           Use the Nginx plugin for authentication & installation
  --webroot         Place files in a server's webroot folder for authentication

OR use different plugins to obtain (authenticate) the cert and then install it:

  --authenticator standalone --installer apache

More detailed help:

  -h, --help [topic]    print this message, or detailed help on a topic;
                        the available topics are:

   all, automation, paths, security, testing, or any of the subcommands or
   plugins (certonly, renew, install, register, nginx, apache, standalone,
   webroot, etc.)

After fetch and pull:

# git status
On branch master
Your branch is up-to-date with 'origin/master'.
nothing to commit, working tree clean
# git rev-parse HEAD
839ff7a2657e6854d053573268b0260f6842e2bd
θ100° [root@revue:~/Versioned/certbot] # ./certbot-auto --version
letsencrypt 0.9.3
θ100° [root@revue:~/Versioned/certbot] 2s # ./certbot-auto --help

  certbot-auto [SUBCOMMAND] [options] [-d domain] [-d domain] ...

Certbot can obtain and install HTTPS/TLS/SSL certificates.  By default,
it will attempt to use a webserver both for obtaining and installing the
cert. Major SUBCOMMANDS are:

  (default) run        Obtain & install a cert in your current webserver
  certonly             Obtain cert, but do not install it (aka "auth")
  install              Install a previously obtained cert in a server
  renew                Renew previously obtained certs that are near expiry
  revoke               Revoke a previously obtained certificate
  register             Perform tasks related to registering with the CA
  rollback             Rollback server configuration changes made during install
  config_changes       Show changes made to server config during installation
  plugins              Display information about installed plugins

Choice of server plugins for obtaining and installing cert:

  --apache          Use the Apache plugin for authentication & installation
  --standalone      Run a standalone webserver for authentication
  --nginx           Use the Nginx plugin for authentication & installation
  --webroot         Place files in a server's webroot folder for authentication

OR use different plugins to obtain (authenticate) the cert and then install it:

  --authenticator standalone --installer apache

More detailed help:

  -h, --help [topic]    print this message, or detailed help on a topic;
                        the available topics are:

   all, automation, paths, security, testing, or any of the subcommands or
   plugins (certonly, renew, install, register, nginx, apache, standalone,
   webroot, etc.)

[pde]

/me nods. Unfortunately you need to do certbot --help all. We have too many flags to show them all by default. But also, we're doing a better job of this in 0.10.0 since we landed #3883 .

[jpluimers]

Ah. Now I see. Which means that ideallycertbot --help all is one of the things that really should get hinted in a more elaborate form when performing a plan certbot --help as I would not have thought that would get way more help (: