BeakerHelpers

BeakerHelpers is a Beaker extension that can show the active sessions and clean the old ones. Currently it only works with beaker.ext.database storage backend.

BeakerHelpers is also a namespace package so new plugins can be created under this namespace.

You can find the Git repository at github.com

Installation

easy_install:

$ <env>/bin/easy_install BeakerHelpers

pip:

$ <env>/bin/pip install BeakerHelpers

Get / Show Sessions Usage

You can call get_sessions to get a list of active sessions (dicts):

>>> import sqlalchemy
>>> from beakerhelpers.sessions import get_sessions
>>> sessions_table = sqlalchemy.Table('beaker_cache',
...     sqlalchemy.MetaData('sqlite:///my.db'), autoload=True)
>>> get_sessions(sessions_table, timeout=3600)  # timeout in seconds
[{
    '_accessed_time': datetime.datetime(2010, 1, 1, 10, 10, 10),
    '_creation_time': datetime.datetime(2010, 1, 1, 08, 40, 00),
    'user_name': u'john@doe.com',
}]

The above form is suitable for Python access. If you want to provide this data to the user you could use show_sessions with the same parameters instead:

>>> print show_sessions(sessions_table, timeout=3600)
--------------------------------------------------------
     _accessed_time |      _creation_time |    user_name
--------------------------------------------------------
2010-01-01 10:10:10 | 2010-01-01 08:40:00 | john@doe.com

However you can use paster beakersessions to call the show_sessions from the console:

$ <env>/bin/paster beakersessions cfg/prod.ini
--------------------------------------------------------
     _accessed_time |      _creation_time |    user_name
--------------------------------------------------------
2010-01-01 10:10:10 | 2010-01-01 08:40:00 | john@doe.com

In this case the cfg/prod.ini file should be a paste.deploy loadable configuration file. BeakerHelpers expects to find these keys in the [app:main] section of cfg/prod.ini:

• beaker.session.type = ext:database - the only supported backend (yet)
• beaker.session.url - an SQLAlchemy engine URL
• beaker.session.timeout - session timeout in seconds
• beaker.session.table_name - (optional) session storage table. According to beaker.ext.database, defaults to beaker_cache.

paster beakersessions command also takes two optional arguments:

• --prefix, -p - beaker key prefix in the config file, defaults to beaker.session

• --timeout, -t - do not show sessions older than the timeout. Timeout examples:

  • 3s - 3 seconds
  • 14m - 14 minutes
  • 36h - 36 hours
  • 2d - 2 days
  • 0 - show all sessions (ignore timeout even in the config file)

  If not provided the timeout will be taken from the config file, <prefix>.timeout (seconds).

Session Cleanup Usage

You can use cleanup_sessions from your Python scripts to remove old sessions:

>>> import sqlalchemy
>>> from beakerhelpers.sessions import cleanup_sessions
>>> sessions_table = sqlalchemy.Table('beaker_cache',
...     sqlalchemy.MetaData('sqlite:///my.db'), autoload=True)
>>> cleanup_sessions(sessions_table, timeout=3600)  # timeout in seconds

The sessions older than 1 hour would get cleaned. However, session cleanup is particularly convenient to be called as a paste script:

$ <env>/bin/paster beakercleanup cfg/prod.ini

It expects the same config file structure and takes the same optional arguments as beakersessions. However, in this case sessions older than --timeout will be removed.

Attention - BeakerShowSessions and BeakerCleanup users

Due to namespace issues BeakerShowSessions and BeakerCleanup can not be installed with pip and/or easy_install. Their functionality got merged into this package and access became simpler. We strongly encourage to use BeakerHelpers instead.