Re: [Userops] a website manager

[Christopher Baines]

On 03/04/15 14:40, Christophe Siraut wrote:
> 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.

In my opinion, it would be good for every package to be able to fully
configure the application. Of cause, the user should be able to prevent
this and do whatever they want to instead.

> 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.

I am unsure how this fits in to the wider picture. Are you talking about
granting access to the application (to its database), or granting
database access to the intended users, user account?

>> 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?

I am very unsure. I think this is a very application specific question.
For example, one apache2 service can host multiple websites, just by
altering the configuration. But I imagine with tt-rss, you would need
two tt-rss services to provide (http://localhost/alice/tt-rss and
http://localhost/bob/tt-rss). As you would need two applications, you
would need two sets of configuration, two systemd service files... You
might be able to do this with debconf, but I am unsure if it would be a
good idea. I also don't think I have ever used any packages capable this
kind of configuration through debconf, or even attempted to manually
setup a system like this.

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