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Spicy cheatsheet

This page covers only the Spicy concepts needed to work in this repository. For the language reference, use the upstream Spicy documentation.

What Spicy Does Here

Glutton embeds the Spicy/HILTI runtime through cgo. The current bridge:

  • initializes the runtime on a locked OS thread
  • lists compiled parser modules
  • registers parser keys from module names
  • parses payload bytes through a generic entry point
  • flattens returned HILTI values into map[string]interface{}

The Go side calls:

parsed, err := spicy.Parse("http", payload)

The result has:

type ParsedData struct {
	Protocol string                 `json:"protocol"`
	Fields   map[string]interface{} `json:"fields"`
	Error    error                  `json:"-"`
}

Current Parsers

Current grammar files:

protocols/spicy/parsers/http.spicy
protocols/spicy/parsers/tcp.spicy

Current registered parser modules:

Spicy module/type Go parser key Purpose
HTTP::Request http Parse HTTP request fields.
TCP::Protocol tcp Detect selected application protocols from raw TCP payload bytes.

Grammar Shape

A Spicy file declares a module and one or more units:

module HTTP;

type Version = unit {
    :       /HTTP\//;
    number: /[0-9]+\.[0-9]*/;
};

public type Request = unit {
    method:  /[^ \t\r\n]+/;
    :        /[ \t]+/;
    version: Version;
};

The real HTTP grammar is richer than this example. Read protocols/spicy/parsers/http.spicy before changing HTTP parsing.

Flattened Fields

The bridge flattens parser output into field names:

method
uri.raw
uri.path
uri.query
version.number
headers[0].name
headers[0].value
body.content

Rules of thumb:

  • nested unit fields become dotted names
  • vectors become indexed names such as headers[0].name
  • bytes may arrive in Go as strings or byte slices depending on bridge handling
  • parser consumers should tolerate missing fields for malformed input

Build Step

Run this after changing .spicy files:

export PATH=/opt/spicy/bin:$PATH
make spicy

The Spicy Makefile generates:

  • protocols/spicy/*.cc
  • protocols/spicy/spicy_linker.cc
  • protocols/spicy/parsers/*.h

Those files are ignored by Git.

Registration

At startup, spicy.Initialize(...) lists compiled parsers. Parser names that contain :: are registered by lowercasing the module name before the first ::.

Examples:

HTTP::Request -> http
TCP::Protocol -> tcp

This is why Go calls spicy.Parse("http", payload) rather than spicy.Parse("HTTP::Request", payload).

No .evt Files Today

Some Spicy and Zeek documentation describes .evt event-translation files. Glutton's current repository does not include .evt files. It compiles .spicy grammar files and consumes parser output through the generic Go bridge.

What Stays In Go

Keep these responsibilities in Go handlers:

  • how much data to read
  • connection deadlines
  • handler routing
  • process logs
  • producer event shape
  • fake service responses
  • fallback behavior after parse failure