SIPA - Supreme Information Providing Application
Name
Just as SIPA stands for a ball over the net game[1], the lesser known Supreme Information Providing Application does just the same -- sending packets over the internet.
This project is a flask-based webserver developed by members of the student network Dresden.
Usage
Please note that SIPA has been built to fit our specific purposes. This means that there will be features you probably won't need, such as the traffic monitoring or splitting the login process into certain divisions.
How can I run Sipa?
As a general note, you should have docker
and docker-compose
installed. Just using python and e.g. a virtualenv is possible, but
discouraged.
The simplest method is to run docker-compose -f build/development.yml up -d
.
This should automatically set up an nginx container on port 80
providing /sipa
and /sipa_debug
, which are two containers of sipa,
the first running on uwsgi, and the second directly using sipa.py
.
If this does not work for you see “Running on Docker” below for a manual (i.e. not docker-compose-based) container setup.
How can I run the tests?
For testing, there exists the docker-compose file build/testing.yml
:
docker-compose -f build/testing.yml up -d
docker-compose -f build/testing.yml run --rm sipa_testing python manage.py test
…ore choose any other testing command you wish. For example, you can
execute a single test case using nosetests -v tests.integration.test_hss_ldap:HssLdapPasswordTestCase
Running on Docker
To build the image, cd
into your instance of sipa (which contains the
Dockerfile
) and run
docker build -t sipa .
Now, you have basically two possibilities to use sipa:
- Using uwsgi: This is the standard option. Just run:
docker run --name sipa -d sipa
Note that in order to use above example, you have to use another docker
container, i.e. an nginx instance, which is linked to the sipa
container. If
you don't want to do this, you have to expose port 5000 adding -p 5000:5000
as
a parameter.
- Using http: This is an option you have to envoke manually. To use it, run
docker run --name sipa -p 5000:5000 -d sipa python sipa.py --exposed
If you want to use sipa for development, adding --debug
after sipa.py
and
mounting your sipa folder using -v <path>:/home/sipa/sipa
is recommended.
Running with a prefix
If you run sipa under something else than /
, make sure you specify this during docker run
!
Instead of the default uwsgi --ini uwsgi.ini
, you will have to use
uwsgi --ini uwsgi.ini:prefixed --set-ph prefix=/mountpoint
Configuration
Environment variables
The default config (sipa.default_config
) reads environment variables
for the most cases.
Local Python config file
If one prefers to write configuration into a file locally, sipa reads
/config.py
. If the environment variable SIPA_CONFIG_FILE
is set,
its path is taken instead.
Logging
In order to provide an additional logfile, set the app's LOG_CONFIG
variable in your local configuration file.
It has to be set to a dict usable by dictConfig()
. For further
documentation, see the python docs.
Also, you might want to look into sipa.defaults.DEFAULT_CONFIG
for the current structure.
Keep in mind you don't need to rewrite the whole default configuration
every time, since you can include 'incremental': True
in said dict.
Required format for the markdown files
In the folder content/
you can place markdown files to use them as content
pages as well as news. The folder structure has to look like this, following
the conditions explained below:
content
├── images
│ ├── image.png
│ └── logo.png
├── legal
│ ├── impressum.de.md
│ ├── impressum.en.md
│ ├── index.de.md
│ └── index.en.md
├── news
│ ├── 2015-03-11-new_website.de.md
│ ├── 2015-03-11-new_website.en.md
│ ├── index.de.md
│ └── index.en.md
└── support
├── contacts.de.md
├── contacts.en.md
├── faq.de.md
├── faq.en.md
├── index.de.md
└── index.en.md
The navigation bar is built by scanning every directory for *.md
-files.
Directories containing the latter are then expected to contain an index file for
every language code, e.g. index.en.md
These index files decide whether it will
appear in the navigation bar and which title it will be displayed with.
The index files have to contain certain metadata in the form property: value
. This metadata section is terminated by an empty line (\n\n
)
-
To not include a folder in the menu, set
index: false
, as you will need for thenews/
folder(!). -
To include a folder, set the title of the navigation bar with
name:
as well as its position withrank
. Do not forget to setindex: true
explicitly.
If the parameter index
does not exist, the corresponding folder will not
appear in the navigation bar, although every folder containing a markdown file
must contain an index.xx.md
file.
The markdown files must have a header in the same fashion as the index files. A complete .md file can look like this:
title: Stuff
author: alice
date: 2015-03-27
glyphicon: glyphicon-user
### Stuff
#### Part 1
To do stuff, you have to do stuff first.
Another possibility is to include hyperlinks, which only have a metadata section:
title: Awesome page
glyphicon: glyphicon-tower
link: http://http://www.awesome-page.com/
rank: 1
Adding dynamic content
Sipa is capable of parsing a json
file to provide “dynamic” content,
i.e. content which varies according to the dormitory selected.
For each content file, Sipa tries to open a file following the naming
scheme <pagename>.<locale>.json
. If it does not exist or does not
contain valid json, this is ignored and no additional block is
displayed on the webpage.
The file has to follow the format below:
{
"title": "Financial data",
"keys": {
"beneficiary": "Beneficiary",
"iban": "IBAN",
"bank": "Bank",
"bic": "BIC",
"information": "Information"
},
"values": {
"wu": {
"beneficiary": "Studentenrat TUD - AG DSN",
"bank": "Ostsächsische Sparkasse Dresden",
"iban": "DE61850503003120219540",
"bic": "OSDD DE 81 XXX",
"information": "User-ID, Last Name, First Name, Dormitory / Room number"
},
"gerok": {
"beneficiary": "Studentenrat TUD - AG DSN",
"bank": "Ostsächsische Sparkasse Dresden",
"iban": "To be investigated",
"bic": "To be investigated",
"information": "To be investigated"
},
"local": {
"beneficiary": "Not available",
"bank": "Not available",
"iban": "Not available",
"bic": "Not available",
"information": "Not available"
}
},
"mappings": {
"wu": "wu",
"zw": "wu",
"borsi": "wu",
"gerok": "gerok",
"localhost": "local"
}
}
Because information may or may not dependend on a data source, it can
be grouped using mappings
. Dormitories whose name is not specified
in mappings
will not appear in the select
field on the web page,
so be careful to keep the list complete.
The value of a mappings
field has to correspond to a dataset in values
.