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  1. Configuration of MoinMoin
    1. Overview of configuration options
    2. Changing character sets
    3. File attachments

Configuration of MoinMoin

MoinMoin is configured by changing the moin_config.py file, which normally sits besides your moin.cgi driver script. moin_config.py is imported by the MoinMoin main code early in a request cycle and is found because the current directory (i.e. that of moin.cgi) is part of the Python system path. Consequently, moin_config.py can sit anywhere in your PYTHONPATH.

Overview of configuration options

The following table contains default values and a short description for all configuration variables. Most of these can be left at their defaults, those you need to change with every installation are listed in the sample moin_config.py that comes with the distribution.

Variable name

Default

Description

LogStore

'text:editlog'

Experimental, keep the default

SecurityPolicy

None

class object hook for implementing security restrictions

acl_enabled (& acl_...)

0

true to enable Access Control Lists - fine grained page access rights settings (see HelpOnAccessControlLists)

allow_extended_names

1

true to enable ["non-standard wikiname"] markup

allow_subpages

1

true to enable hierarchical wiki features (see HelpOnEditing/SubPages)

allow_numeric_entities

1

if true, numeric entities like € for € are not escaped, but & and stuff still is

allow_xslt

0

true to enable XSLT processing via 4Suite (note that this enables anyone with enough know-how to insert arbitrary HTML into your wiki, which is why it defaults to 0)

allowed_actions

[]

allow unsafe actions (list of strings)

attachments

None

If None, send attachments via CGI; else this has to be a dictionary with the path to attachment storage (key dir) and the equivalent URL prefix to that same dir (key url)

auth_http_enabled

0

true to enable moin using the username of a user already authenticated by http basic auth

backtick_meta

1

true to enable `inline literal` markup

bang_meta

0

true to enable !NoWikiName markup

caching_formats

['text_html']

output formats that are cached; set to [] to turn off caching (useful for development)

changed_time_fmt

'%H:%M'

Time format used on RecentChanges for page edits within the last 24 hours

charset

'iso-8859-1'

The encoding / character set your system uses

chart_options

None

if you have gdchart, use something like chart_options = {'width': 720, 'height': 540}

check_i18n

0

Set to 1 only in development systems, or on a translator's system

cookie_lifetime

12

12 hours from now until the MoinMoin cookie expires and you get logged out

data_dir

'./data/'

Path to the data directory, the default is OK if you place the data directory right besides your moin.cgi

date_fmt

'%Y-%m-%d'

System date format, used mostly in RecentChanges

datetime_fmt

'%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S'

Default format for dates and times (when the user has no preferences or chose the "default" date format)

default_lang

'en'

default language for page contents, and also the default user language if not set by other means

default_markup

'wiki'

Default page parser / format (name of module in MoinMoin.parser)

edit_locking

'warn 10'

Editor locking policy: None, 'warn <timeout in minutes>', or 'lock <timeout in minutes>'

edit_rows

30

Default height of the edit box

hosts_deny

[]

List of denied IPs; if an IP ends with a dot, it denies a whole subnet (class A, B or C)

html_head

Additional <HEAD> tags for all pages (see HelpOnSkins)

html_head_queries

META-Tag with "NOINDEX,NOFOLLOW" for robots

Additional <HEAD> tags for edit and action pages (html_head is sent, too; see HelpOnSkins)

html_pagetitle

None

Allows you to set a specific HTML page title (if not set, it defaults to the value of sitename)

httpd_docs

'./wiki-moinmoin'

directory with public files, when using the stand-alone server

httpd_host

'localhost'

hostname of the stand-alone server

httpd_port

8080

port of the stand-alone server

httpd_user

'nobody'

user to run the stand-alone server under (UNIX only)

interwikiname

None

InterWiki name (prefix, moniker) of the site, or None

logo_string

'<img src="%s" border="0" alt="%s">' % (logo_url, sitename)

The img tag used to format the logo display in the upper-left corner of a page and used in RSS documents

logo_url

MoinMoin logo

The URL path to the logo used by logo_string above

lowerletters

Latin 1 alphabetic characters and digits

Lowercase letters, used to define what is a WikiName

mail_from

None

From: header used in sent mails

mail_login

None

"user pwd" if you need to use SMTP AUTH

mail_smarthost

None

IP or domain name of an SMTP-enabled server; note that email features (notification, mailing of login data) works only if this variable is set

max_macro_size

50

Maximum size of some macro pages in KB, especially used to limits the size of RecentChanges; use 0 to disable that feature

navi_bar

list of default quick links

Most important links in text form (these links can be over-ridden by the user's quick links); to link to any URL, use a free-form link of the form "[url text]"

nonexist_qm

0

Default for displaying WantedPages with a question mark, like in the original wiki (changeable by the user)

page_category_regex

'^Category[A-Z]'

Pagenames containing a match for this regex are regarded as Wiki categories

page_credits

MoinMoin and PythonPowered

html fragment with logos or strings for crediting

page_dict_regex

'[a-z]Dict$'

Pagenames containing a match for this regex are regarded as containing variable dictionary definitions

page_footer1

Custom HTML markup sent before the system footer (see HelpOnSkins)

page_footer2

Custom HTML markup sent after the system footer (see HelpOnSkins)

page_form_regex

'[a-z]Form$'

Pagenames containing a match for this regex are regarded as containing form definitions

page_front_page

'FrontPage'

Name of the front page

page_group_regex

'[a-z]Group$'

Pagenames containing a match for this regex are regarded as containing group definitions

page_header1

Custom HTML markup sent before the system header / title area (see HelpOnSkins)

page_header2

Custom HTML markup sent after the system header / title area (see HelpOnSkins)

page_iconbar

["view", ...]

list of icons to show in iconbar

page_icons_table

dict

dict of {'iconname': (url, title, icon-img-key), ...}

page_license_enabled

0

Show a license hint in page editor.

page_license_page

'WikiLicense'

Page linked from the license hint.

page_local_spelling_words

'LocalSpellingWords'

Name of the page containing user-provided spellchecker words

page_template_regex

'[a-z]Template$'

Pagenames containing a match for this regex are regarded as templates for new pages

refresh

None

refresh = (minimum_delay_s, targets_allowed) enables use of #refresh 5 PageName processing instruction, targets_allowed must be either 'internal' or 'external'

shared_intermap

None

path to a file containing global InterWiki definitions (or a list of such filenames)

show_hosts

1

true to show hostname in RecentChanges

show_section_numbers

1

true to show section numbers in headings by default

show_timings

0

shows some timing values at bottom of page - used for development

show_version

0

show MoinMoin's version at the bottom of each page

sitename

'An Unnamed MoinMoin Wiki'

Short description of your wiki site, displayed below the logo on each page, and used in RSS documents as the channel title

smileys

{}

User-defined smileys (a dict with the markup as the key and a tuple of width, height, border, image name as the value)

theme_default

'classic'

the name of the theme that is used by default (see HelpOnThemes)

theme_force

False

if True, do not allow to change the theme

trail_size

5

Number of pages in the trail of visited pages

tz_offset

0.0

default time zone offset in hours from UTC

ua_spiders

...|google|wget|...

A regex of HTTP_USER_AGENTs that should be excluded from logging

umask

0770

umask used on all open(), mkdir() and similar calls

upperletters

Latin 1 alphabetic characters

Uppercase letters, used to define what is a WikiName

url_mappings

{}

lookup table to remap URL prefixes (dict of 'prefix': 'replacement'); especially useful in intranets, when whole trees of externally hosted documents move around

url_prefix

'/wiki'

Used as the base URL for all public documents served by the wiki, especially the image files for the icons

url_schemas

[]

additional URL schemas you want to have recognized (list of strings)

Changing character sets

If you want to use MoinMoin with a character set other than Latin-1, you might or even have to change the default character sets for WikiNames in "moin_config.py". A safe default is US-ASCII, i.e. 

upperletters = "A-Z"
lowerletters = "0-9a-z"

With that setting, you need to set "allow_extended_names=1" and use the special markup for extended WikiNames ["extended name"] to get any names with characters outside the core latin alphabet.

File attachments

The AttachFile action enables a page to have multiple attached files. Since file uploads could be abused for DoS (Denial of Service) attacks, AttachFile is an action that may be enabled by the wiki administrator. To do this, add "allowed_actions = ['AttachFile']" to your configuration file.

If you wiki has (or is expected to have) many file attachments, there is an option which will eliminate the CGI overhead associated with each retrieval of an attachment file.

There are two storage/retrieval models for file attachments:

  1. Attachments are stored "privately" and can only be retrieved via a CGI GET (via URLs like http://myorg.org/mywiki/<SomePage>?action=AttachFile&do=get&target=filename.ext).

  2. Attachments are stored into a directory directly accessible by the web server, and can thus be served directly by the webserver, without any invocation of MoinMoin (leading to URLs like http://myorg.org/mywikiattach/<Somepage>/attachments/filename.ext).

If the efficiency of serving file attachments is a concern, the second option is preferable, but it also requires additional configuration steps and possibly more rights on the host machine. Because of this, the first option is the default; attachments are stored in the "...mywiki/data/pages/" directory, with paths like "...mywiki/data/pages/<pagename>/attachments/<filename>".

The MoinMoin attachments configuration option allows you to move the directory structure used to store attachments to another location. Unless you have a reason for doing so, there is no need to use a different location. Using a different location may be more work and more risk, as all the existing attachments must be copied to the new location. The following instructions are for Apache servers and assume you intend to leave the attachment files in their existing location and your original installation used the name "mywiki".

The first step is to tell Apache that it has another Alias directory from which it can serve files. Review the changes you made to the httpd.conf (or commonhttpd.conf) file during the MoinMoin installation and find the ScriptAlias statement similar to the following: 

    ScriptAlias /mywiki           ".../mywiki/moin.cgi"

Create an Alias statement similar to the ScriptAlias statement above, replacing the /mywiki URI with /mywikiattach/ and replacing moin.cgi with data/pages/. 

    Alias       /mywikiattach/    ".../mywiki/data/pages/"

Be sure to note the differences in the trailing slashes between the two statements, they must be entered exactly as shown above. If you are making this change to a running system, you must restart Apache to have the change take effect.

The second step is to tell MoinMoin to let Apache do the work of fetching file attachments. To do this, you need to add an attachments option to .../mywiki/moin_config.py. The 'attachment' option is a dictionary of two values: 

attachments = {
    'dir': '.../mywiki/data/pages',
    'url': '/mywikiattach',
}

MoinMoin must still do the work of uploading file attachments. The dir value above tells MoinMoin where to store attachments; note this is the same as the path in the new Apache Alias statement but without the trailing "/". The url value tells MoinMoin how to retrieve the attachments; this matches the URI in the Alias statement but again without the trailing "/".

After you have completed the configuration changes, test by uploading an attachment for WikiSandBox. Then modify the WikiSandBox page to display the uploaded image or download the file. If there were existing attachments before this change, verify the old attachments are still available. Finally, review the Apache access.log file to verify you have a log entry showing the expected file access:

HelpOnConfiguration (last edited 2008-04-29 11:45:53 by localhost)