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svenweb

Svenweb is a project mainly written in PYTHON and SHELL, it's free.

A bzr-backed wiki

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. BZR is better.

Quickstart::

virtualenv svenweb; cd svenweb; source bin/activate easy_install -e -b . svenweb easy_install bzr cd svenweb python setup.py develop bzr init /tmp/bzr paster serve paste.ini

The application will now be running on localhost:5052 against a new BZR repository in /tmp/bzr.

Now navigate to a path to start editing a file there.

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.

Using bazaar

To use the BZR backend you should be running bzr 2.0 or so. 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.