[pmwiki-users] Re: SourceForge.net Read-Only Policy - PmWiki-Compatible!

[chr at home.se]

On Sat, 14 May 2005, H. Fox wrote:

> Here's my alternate method (1st draft), which doesn't use world-writable
> directories or directories with the default "users" group.  Does this
> look acceptable? Is it "more secure" or a waste of extra effort?

Getting rid of 'world-writable' definitely seems worthwhile to me... 

> If it's acceptable I'll put it, or something similar, in the cookbook
> page.

Please do! I'm considering moving the wiki pages for 'pmwiki-mode' (an
Emacs mode) to a wiki at sourceforge, having this information then will be
really useful.  In fact, once you've put it up as a cookbook page, let me 
know and I'll give the process a test run.

> First, if you haven't done so, prepare project's directory in
> /tmp/persistent/.

This is done via shell login to sourceforge, right? (As opposed to putting
the commands in a .php-file and having the web server execute it)

> mkdir /tmp/persistent/qdig
> cd /tmp/persistent/qdig/
> chmod 755 .
> 
> Next, create a directory to hold PmWiki data.
> 
> mkdir pmwiki-files
> chgrp qdig pmwiki-files
> chmod 2777 pmwiki-files

Maybe 'pmwiki.d' would be a more consistent name for this directory? 
(I'm thinking of wiki.d/, cache.d/ etc)

> Next, edit the local/config.php file.

I think introducing a variable for the directory path makes sense here...  
resulting in the following slightly modified code:

	## Define path to directory for pmwiki to store data in
	$PmWikiD = "/tmp/persistent/qdig/pmwiki-files";

	## Writable place for session data
	session_save_path("$PmWikiD/sessions");
 
	## Store wiki pages outside the document tree.
	$WorkDir = "$PmWikiD/wiki.d";
	$WikiDir = new PageStore("$PmWikiD/wiki.d/".'$FullName');
 
	## Place uploads outside the document tree.
	$UploadDir = "$PmWikiD/uploads";
	$EnableDirectDownload = 0;
	$EnableUpload = 1;
	$DefaultPasswords['upload']='$1$/PPoEleM$R1TrfXrbL.A9DFVxyR36I1';

> Next, visit the site to create a writable wiki.d directory...
> ... which will be renamed to use as the directory for sessions data.
> 
> mv pmwiki-files/wiki.d pmwiki-files/sessions

I think there is a pmwiki function we can simply call to create
'sessions/' directly...  Looking at pmwiki.php, I suspect it is 
simply called 'mkdirp()'. According to it's brief comment:

## mkdirp creates a directory and its parents as needed, and sets
## permissions accordingly.

Patrick, is ok to use this function to create directories that you want 
pmwiki to be able to write to?

> Visit the site again to create another wiki.d directory...
> ...which will be renamed to use as the directory for uploads.
> 
> mv pmwiki-files/wiki.d pmwiki-files/uploads
> 
> Visit the site again to create another wiki.d directory.

Ok... this is silly now... but I fully understand why you're doing it 
(there are lots of times that I wish I'd created all these directories in 
one go).

How about having a snippet of code in config.php that's only executed if
you append '?action=setup' to the URI. The snippet of code would then call
the appropriate pmwiki function to create the relevant directories.
The code could look like this:

	if($action == 'setup') {
		mkdirp("$PmWikiD/sessions");
		mkdirp("$PmWikiD/uploads");
	}

What do you think?

/Christian

> Now change the permissions of the pmwiki-files/ directory.
> 
> chmod 755 pmwiki-files/
> 
> Now you have three directories that are writable by your user and the
> server, but not other users on the system.
> 
> ls -l pmwiki-files/
> 
> drwxrwsr-x  2 nfsnobody qdig 4096 May 14 01:24 sessions
> drwxrwsr-x  2 nfsnobody qdig 4096 May 14 01:24 uploads
> drwxrwsr-x  2 nfsnobody qdig 4096 May 14 01:24 wiki.d
> 

-- 
Christian Ridderström, +46-8-768 39 44               http://www.md.kth.se/~chr