Installing and configuring standalone server

See also: HelpOnConfiguration/IntegratingWithApache

The standalone server is especially made for local wikis because it does not need a web server installed. Only Python and Moin are necessary!

The quick way

See DesktopEdition.

The flexible way

Instead of just running it like described above, you can of course move stuff to different places (see ../BasicInstallation, ../WikiInstanceCreation).

You can then invoke the moin standalone server using the moin scripting command:

# for details and other options, see: moin server standalone --help
moin --config-dir=/etc/moin server standalone --docs=/usr/share/moin/htdocs

Of course you have to give correct values that match your setup:

• --config-dir gives the directory that contains your wikiconfig (or farmconfig).

  • wikiconfig points to other important pathes, e.g. data_dir and underlay_dir

• --docs gives the directory where moin finds the static files (css, imgs, etc.)

If it does not find the moin command:

• if you used setup.py it should have copied it to /usr(/local)/bin - check your PATH.

• if you don't want to use setup.py just write your own moin command script:

  #Fix and uncomment those 2 lines if it doesn't find the MoinMoin package:
  #import sys
  #sys.path.insert(0, '/path/to/moin_code')
  from MoinMoin.script.moin import run
  run()

If it crashes and tells it can't import MoinMoin, then just uncomment and fix the sys.path stuff you see above.

Now point your browser at http://localhost:8080/ (or whatever moin tells you).

If you want to run the moin process as a daemon, have a look at the --start, --stop and --pidfile options.

Serving port 80 on Unix

On GNU/Linux, Mac OS X or other Posix like OS, you can serve the standard port 80 used for web serving, but you must start moin as root for this or redirect a port as root.

1st method (recommended)

Run standalone on port 8080 as described above and using iptables redirect all traffic from port 80 to 8080, assuming your external ip adress is 10.0.0.1:

-A net_dnat -d 10.0.0.1/32 -p tcp -m tcp --dport 80 -j DNAT --to-destination 10.0.0.1:8080

2nd method (not recommended)

Set port to 80, and verify that user and group exists on your system. If not, set them to an existing user, meant for web serving. If needed, chown your wiki dir to this user and group.

Standalone Server configuration

Alternatively to giving parameters by commandline options, you can also have a wikiserverconfig.py and specify your stuff in a Config class there. See the example file in the toplevel directory.

• There may be more options useful to moin developers, see the comments in moin.py

Configuring wikiconfig.py

The sample config file should be just fine.

The default value of url_prefix_static is hardcoded into the standalone server script, do not change it or it won't work!

Using the secure standalone server

The standalone server supports SSL when using the SecureThreadPoolServer server class. The SSL support is provided by the TLSLite library. All wiki traffic is forced to SSL when using the SecureThreadPoolServer.

Two additional configuration options are required when using the SecureThreadPoolServer. First, ssl_privkey must point to the server's private key. Second, ssl_certificate must point to the server's certificate.

TLSLite does not support a password protected private key unless additional libraries are used. Consult the TLSLite webpage for more information.

Typically a certificate would be purchased from an certificate authority, such as Thawte (http://www.thawte.com). However, since the suggested usage of the standalone server is for personal use, a self signed certificate may be appropriate. For more information on how to generate a server private key, and a self signed certificate, see the openssl HOWTO pages.

For example, to create the server's private key, run the following:

openssl genrsa -out privkey.pem 2048

To create a self signed certificate for the newly created private key, run the following:

openssl req -new -x509 -key privkey.pem -out cacert.pem -days 1095

moin.py then needs to be told about the generated files privkey.pem and cacert.pem. For the example above, the following lines would need to be added to moin.py:

    ssl_privkey = "/secure/path/to/privkey.pem"
    ssl_certificate = "/secure/path/to/cacert.pem"

Using a self signed certificate will cause your browser to generate a warning that it cannot verify the identify of the wiki server. This is because the certificate was not signed by a recognized certificate authority (CA). In order to get rid of this warning, you must purchase a certificate from a CA.

Serving Port 443

A secure standalone server may be run to listen on port 443, but this requires root to start the server. An alternative, is to use iptables to run a secure standalone server on an unprivileged port such as 8081 but redirect traffic through privileged port 443 (setting iptables requires root):

/sbin/iptables -t nat -A PREROUTING -p tcp --dport 443 -j REDIRECT --to-port 8081
/sbin/iptables -t nat -A OUTPUT -o lo -p tcp --dport 443 -j REDIRECT --to-port 8081

It is also necessary to indicate that the https scheme is to be used instead of http. In the wikiserverconfig.py configuration (see above), a property must be set as:

    properties = { "is_ssl": 1 }