web_client_location documentation fix

[matthewjwolff]

The config option web_client_location is very sparsely documented. In my case, I wanted to see if I could get the matrix homeserver to host the riot.im electron app sources. To remedy the lack in documentation, I

1. Made the generated homeserver.yaml include information about this field. (synapse/config/server.py)

2. Changed the Readme portion for Arch Linux users. The AngularJS sdk is not distributed with the synapse package, so running synapse with the default homeserver.yaml will fail on Arch if matrix-synpase is installed from the repo. This is documented on the Arch wiki but not here.

3. Removed the string substitution from the error message in synapse/app/homeserver.py. The error message implies that it will only be printed if matrix-angular-sdk is not installed. But if matrix-angular-sdk is not installed, the program will crash when trying to perform the string substitution and not print the error message, defeating its purpose. If there's a better way to prevent this error, please enlighten me.

I saw that yall welcome additions to AUTHORS.rst. I feel like this fix isn't big enough for it to be appropriate to put my name next to the real developers. But hey if yall are fine with it I'd be happy to put my name there.

Signed-off-by: Matthew Wolff matthewjwolff@gmail.com

[matrixbot]

Can one of the admins verify this patch?

[matrixbot]

Can one of the admins verify this patch?

[matrixbot]

Can one of the admins verify this patch?

[APwhitehat]

String substitution could be failing because there is no key "matrix-angular-sdk" in DEPENDENCY_LINKS, see https://github.com/matrix-org/synapse/blob/master/synapse/python_dependencies.py#L76
Also it seems to be put into CONDITIONAL_REQUIREMENTS as "web_client".

I'm sort of new here so I could be wrong. 😛

[matthewjwolff]

Yeah that is exactly why the string substitution fails. But I don't understand what the purpose of DEPENDENCY_LINKS is here. It seems to be an empty array whether matrix-angular-sdk is installed or not. Do things get added into that array in the course of server initialization? Maybe the thing that adds DEPENDENCY_LINKS["matrix-angular-sdk"] should occur earlier in server initialization?

[APwhitehat]

The purpose of DEPENDENCY_LINKS seems to be maintaining a list of all external dependencies which needs to be installed via url.
DEPENDENCY_LINKS is not initialized anywhere else afaik.
Also it seems to be static data like REQUIREMENTS & CONDITIONAL_REQUIREMENTS.

For your case you should probably link the "matrix-angular-sdk" from CONDITIONAL_REQUIREMENTS["web_client"]

[matthewjwolff]

I liked APwhitehat's suggestion

[APwhitehat]

I'll recommend you not to mix two different kinds of changes in a single PR.It may cause confusion.
Perhaps indentation fixes in another PR?

[matthewjwolff]

I don't know how all those indentation changes got put in.... I definitely didn't mean to touch every file in the project...

Anyways I amended my previous commit to only the changes I originally intended to make. Sorry about that.

[erikjohnston]

Looks good! Did you manage to get it to host a riot instance in the end?

[matthewjwolff]

I did. And it was literally as easy as web_client_location: "/usr/lib/riot/webapp" (at least with how Arch packages the Riot electron app).

[matthewjwolff]

I was going to investigate changing my riot instance so that the default homeserver is my domain instead of whatever Riot has as the default. I think the default is vector.im or matrix.org or something....

[erikjohnston]

Cool! Thanks for this :)