web frontend to versioncontrolled document repository for read-write-index-history operations
Project description
Svenweb is a web environment for editing and publishing versioned documents.
It uses a version-controlled repository as its database and works against a checkout. Currently supported backends are SVN and BZR.
To use the BZR backend you should be running bzr 2.0 or so[1]
Alternative backends may be supported one day.
To configure it, look at the paste.ini configuration; you will want to change at least svenweb.checkout_dir:
[app:svenweb] ... svenweb.checkout_dir = /path/to_your/svn/checkout/
The checkout must already exist; svenweb won’t create it for you.
Then you can run it with paster serve paste.ini
What it doesn’t do
Svenweb doesn’t care about authentication. If you do, you should configure this outside of svenweb or in an additional WSGI middleware layer.
Likewise svenweb doesn’t respect authentication. Commits will all be made by the system’s default user. In a future version this will change to respect environment variables.
Svenweb doesn’t provide in-browser diffs between revisions. I’d like to add this eventually.
Svenweb doesn’t provide RSS for changes. It should.
Svenweb doesn’t provide facilities for moving, copying or deleting files through the web. Adding these will likely be my next priority.
Usage
Svenweb uses a wiki-style workflow for adding new documents: just visit the URL of the document you want to create. You’ll find an edit form.
If you visit /baz/bar/foo/ then the directories /baz/ and /baz/bar/ will be created and checked in to the repository if they do not yet exist.
Svenweb aggressively redirects redundant versions of all its views:
If a document /foo was last changed in r5 and you visit /foo?version=8, you will be redirected to /foo?version=5.
If /foo’s last change was in r5 and you visit /foo you will be redirected to /foo?version=5.
This means that every URL with a ?version parameter can be cached forever if you want.
Read
Visit a document’s URL to view its latest version.
Append ?version=5 to view it as of r5.
Write
Visit /foo?view=edit to edit the document stored at /foo.
You can edit the file, and also set a mimetype which will be used when serving the file.
You can also add a commit message. If you don’t, the default commit message is “foom.”
Index
You can view the contents of a directory by visiting the directory’s URL. Versions work here too; visiting directory /baz/bar/?version=5 will display the contents of that directory as of r5.
History
You can view a history (changelog) for any file or directory’s URL by using the querystring ?view=history.
For directories, this will display the history of changes within that directory, including file additions and modifications in subdirectories.
You can use ?version=5 modifiers as well, to see a history of changes up through the version specified.
Miscellany
Tests
There are the beginnings of a test suite in the ./ftests directory. These are flunc tests, which run twill scripts over HTTP. You should easy_install flunc if you want to run the tests.
- To run them, start a svenweb server on localhost:5052 with
svenweb.checkout_dir = /tmp/svnco/
- Then run
./run-flunc.sh
It should work with both the SVN and BZR backends.
Templates
The templates are Tempita templates. They are minimal by design. You can fork them; just change the value of svenweb.templates_dir in the paste.ini file.
- [1] This is for the “index” view specifically i.e. for directory views.
In 2.0 bzr makes it easier to find the last changed revision of any file within a directory. See https://bugs.edge.launchpad.net/bzr/+bug/97715
Note that svenweb’s current implementation of the index view WILL NOT WORK with mod_wsgi because of a call to sys.stdout.flush() in bzrlib.commands which is triggered by sven.bzr.log – I really ought to fix this in sven.bzr by implementing the log method more properly, somehow.
Changelog
New in this version
BZR repositories are now supported. This is much faster than SVN. To use, simply add ‘svenweb.repo_type=bzr’ to your paste.deploy configuration.
Added a WSGI middleware filter to set a response’s Content-type header based on the versioned mimetype property of a resource. It can be used independent of the rest of svenweb, for example if you want to publish the current contents of your versioned resources with a static file server. Use like:
[filter:contenttype] use = egg:svenweb#content_type checkout_dir = /path/to_your/checkout/ default_content_type = text/plain repo_type = bzrThe ‘repo_type’ and ‘default_content_type’ settings are optional.
What’s next
A little speculative roadmap:
0.2: This version.
0.3: Copying, moving and deleting files. Some refactoring of WSGI components.
- 0.4: Using REMOTE_USER to determine the username to commit with, or something
like that. More refactoring of WSGI components.
0.5: RSS or atom feeds. Diffs between arbitrary revisions. More refactoring.
History
0.1.1 (2010-01-03)
First release.
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