Tech News
← Back to articles

Lessons learned from `oapi-codegen`'s time in the GitHub Secure Open Source Fund

read original related products more articles

As noted in GitHub's post, oapi-codegen was one of the projects taking part in the third GitHub Secure Open Source Fund session.

I'd like to take a moment to reflect on the program, and some learnings I've taken from it.

One of the quotes I shared at the end of the program summed up my time:

Having time dedicated to following best practices has been invaluable☆(well, $10k)

Why did we join the fund?

oapi-codegen is a project that takes an OpenAPI specification and generates Go code for either interacting with that API via an autogenerated client, or generates scaffolding for a number of HTTP servers and web frameworks to reduce the implementation burden, as well as generating types for API request/responses.

Given the project is in a fairly privileged position - interacting with every HTTP request/response on either client or server-side, and likely exposed to sensitive data and credentials - securing the project is very important.

As a code generator, oapi-codegen can generate a fair bit of code for you to commit to your project.

But does everyone review the generated code? Hopefully yes 🫣 But given we can't guarantee it, we want to make sure that nothing dodgy could land in folks' codebases.

Extending the maintainer pool

... continue reading