Skip to content

dmdm/PySite

Repository files navigation

PySite - Multi-Tenant Site Server

PySite is a simple, yet multi-tentant capable server for websites, based on the Pyramid Framework.

Compose your websites with HTML and Jinja templates and store them in a domain specific directory. Setup your DNS and webserver so that each site is a virtual host, as described in Virtual Root Support. Each site will then be accessible with URLs like these:

http://localhost/sites/www.site_1.org/index
http://www.site_1.org/index

http://localhost/sites/www.site_2.org/index
http://www.site_2.org/index

Note

The rendered documentation is available online: http://3amcode.de/PySite/

How to Build a Site

Configure the directory where you want to store the sites in one of the appropriate configuration files in directory etc as key sites_dir.

Create a Site

Inside SITES_DIR, create a directory with the site's domain name, and put file rc.yaml in it. This file contains the configuration settings of this site.

The overall tree of a site must be like this:

SITES_DIR
|
+-- www.example.org
    |
    +-- rc.yaml            --> Config of this site
    |
    +-- content
    |   |
    |   +-- base.jinja2    --> Some base template
    |   +-- index.jinja2   --> Template of page index
    |   +-- index.html     --> Content of page index (optional)
    |   +-- index.yaml     --> Config of page index
    |
    +-- assets
    |   |
    |   +-- styles.css
    |
    +-- cache

Create Templates and Content

Create subdirectory content. For each page you want to serve, create a configuration file with the page's name, e.g. index.yaml. This file contains configuration settings for this page, e.g. title, keywords etc. (We could place these into the template, in a separate file however, the settings are more easy to manage by scripts or to put them into a DB later.)

The filename without extension will be the address of this page in the URL.

In the settings file you may specify the template for this page. If none is given there, the template defaults to a Jinja2 file, e.g. index.jinja2 for index.yaml.

Inside a template the settings of the site are available as dict site, those of the page as dict page. E.g. you may access the page's title as {{ page['title'] }} or {{ page.title }}.

You may create subfolders to store your pages. Each subfolder must have a corresponding YAML file:

content
|
+-- base.jinja2
+-- index.jinja2
+-- index.html
+-- index.yaml
|
+-- foo.jinja2       --> Optional template for page/folder `foo'
+-- foo.yaml         --> Config for page/folder `foo'
+-- foo              --> Folder `foo'
    |
    +-- bar.yaml     --> Config for page `bar'

You do not need to create template or HTML files for folders. If a folder is requested, PySite will display a default message then.

This schematic also means that from the user's point of view there is no distinction between pages and folders. A page has content and may contain subpages at the same time.

Linking

For static assets like CSS and images, create directory assets inside the site's directory.

On startup, PySite adds a static route to the assets directory of each site [1]. The route name is the domain name prefixed with static-. E.g. static-www.example.org.

In a template there are two functions available to conveniently build URLs. url() to create an absolute URL to another page, and asset_url() to create an URL to a static asset:

<a href="{{ url('second') }}">Go to second page</a>
<img src="{{ asset_url('img/logo.png') }}" />

Hints

Configuration

Use Pyramid's paster INI files only to configure the (waitress) server, the app's entry point and includes, and logging. Anything else is moved into the YAML files in directory etc.

Apart from preferring YAML over INI, this has the advantage of easier maintaining settings for different environments, because host specific settings inherit the base ones. Also, secrets may be stored in a separate file and are excluded from version control (no more accidentally publishing credentials on github ;).

Read doc strings of module rc.py and http://3amcode.de/pharaoh/Cms/pharaoh/parenchym/configuration/ for details.

Directories

The project's directory tree is similar to Linux': bin for scripts, etc for configuration, var for variable contents, and pysite for this project's package.

Rather than having all resources in resources.py and views in views.py or sth. like this as suggested by the Pyramid manual, we use a sub-package layout. This means for example, all files concerning resources are stored in sub-package resmgr like this:

pysite
|
+-- resmgr
|   |
|   +-- __init__.py
|   +-- models.py
|   +-- views.py
|
+-- [...] other libs

This way we may use a sub-package in other projects more easily.

Sample Apache Configuration

Enable the following modules: headers, proxy, proxy_http.

Configure a virtual host like this:

<VirtualHost *:80>
   ServerName www.example.org
   RewriteEngine On
   RewriteRule ^/(.*) http://localhost:6543/$1 [L,P]
   ProxyPreserveHost on
   RequestHeader add X-Vhm-Root /sites/www.example.org
</VirtualHost>

Let your local Python HTTP server listen on localhost, port 6543.

Site Templates

Directory var/site-templates contains demo sites. Copy them to your sites_dir directory.

My Blog

My blog covers other topics about programming, and stuff.

Roadmap

Step 1 (DONE)

Build the foundation so that PySite is able to serve several sites. The sites can be managed via filesystem.

Step 2 (DONE)

Implement User and group management, auth and authz. Integrate elFinder so that the site's contents and files can be managed via webbrowser.

Append /@@filemgr to a site's URL to enter file manager.

Append /@@login or /@@logout to any URL to log(?:in|out).

E.g.:

http://www.my-site.org/@@filemgr

or

http://www.master-site.org/sites/www.my-site.org/@@filemgr

Step 3 (DONE)

Added ACE online code editor.

Started facilities to manage virtual mailboxes.

Step 4..n (todo)

  • Append /@@edit to a page's URL to enter edit mode of this page.
  • Build UI to allow editing of contents in a more friendly wysiwyg manner.
  • Have in-line editing with "hallo" or "aloha" editor, like Mezzanine.
  • Maybe integrate database
  • UI to manage sites, not only content, users, ACL etc.
[1]Yes, this means, every time you add or remove a site, PySite must be restarted. This is rather ugly / inconvenient if PySite is served by mod_wsgi. So we advice to serve PySite from a Python webserver (e.g. gunicorn) and use Apache or nginx as proxy.

About

PySite is a system to manage and design multiple websites.

Resources

License

Stars

Watchers

Forks

Releases

No releases published

Packages

No packages published