Lua Posts

I’ve been working with one of my clients the last month on migrating his iron- based architecture to a cloud-based provider. In this transition, we are going from one or two physical servers to multiple cloud servers and separating out parts to better scale each individual service. As part of this, we are moving a significant library of images and videos away from being served off the same web server as the application and to a server tuned to handle requests for these static assets. The problem is that a lot of these assets (the videos and full-size images) are for paying members only. We need a way to secure those resources across physical servers.

Hammerspoon is a pretty nifty tool. It’s kind of difficult to explain what it does, but the best I can do is that it allows you to use Lua to script actions on your Mac and, crucially, respond to events. For instance, I use Hammerspoon to lauch all my applications when I get to work and lay them out on the screen in the order that I like. I can do this because I was able to attach a location listener to work’s location, and execute Lua code on arrival. The amount of things that you can do with this tool is pretty stunning. It’s become an indespensible part of my macOS experience.