I just spent a week of evenings on the access side of go-proxmox. Realms, groups, users and roles all landed. Before any of that, I reworked how a client gets its credentials in the first place. Proxmox gives you two different ways to authenticate. They behave differently enough that it’s worth writing down how each one works on the wire and what the client does with it.

If you start automating Proxmox VE through the API, one thing trips you up first. Almost nothing you ask it to do is finished when the HTTP call returns. Start a VM, clone a template, download an ISO to storage, delete a disk… the response is a single string that looks like a typo. The actual work is happening in a worker process on the node. If your next call depends on that work being done, you have to go find out when it’s done.

Part of a hobby of mine is running a home lab and using on Proxmox VE to do the virtualization. Since I work in the space I’m slowly trying to build tooling around Proxmox that will let me use the home lab full time for work. Usually my work involves building Kubernetes management tooling. You can imagine waiting for public cloud APIs all day can take away hours of your day. That’s at cost to your employer for both your time and the compute resources.

I recently had to spend some time to learn Cue and felt the examples/tutorials were a bit lacking. The paradigm shift to the entire language sort of messed with my head, and some things Cue does were a bit foreign to me. To get started, note that I spent all of my time getting this information from two places: their main docs and a community Cuetorials site. This will be a tutorial on how you can use Cue to generate two different YAML documents, all starting with Go types to generate Cue files.