Re: [Userops] a website manager

[Christophe Siraut]

Christopher Baines wrote:
> On 02/04/15 17:48, Christophe Siraut wrote:
> > Installing web applications with a package manager is despite the name
> > like adding libraries to the system, they cannot be used per se. We need
> > a website manager: a tool for managing web application instances.
> 
> What do you mean by "they cannot be used per se"? Do you mean the
> package does not fully configure and start the application?

Yes. Most web applications in Debian are not fully configured by debconf
and should not be, because part of the configuration is user specific:
some want multiple instances of a CMS engine, multiple users could want
their own instance(s) of a single wiki application.

Web applications do not behave normally: they do not store user specific
data in home folders but in databases… I wonder if we could design a
sane system configuration were users are granted databases access and
domain names like $app1.$username.localhost.

> For example, one package which does this well in my experience is
> tt-rss. When you install tt-rss, it will sort out the database (this is
> actually delegated to the dbconfig-common package), ask the full url is
> that they want (e.g. http://example.org/tt-rss/ ) and ask them if they
> want a web server configured (e.g. apache2, lighttpd). Once the package
> has finished installing, then tt-rss is ready to be used.

I tried tt-rss and I am really impressed by its postinst, i confirm it
does all the required configuration, supports multiple backends, and
provide a working http://localhost/tt-rss. Could Debconf help me or
non-admin users to add other instances of tt-rss?

Christophe