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.

How can I run Sipa?

As a general note, you should have docker and docker-compose installed.

The simplest method is to run docker-compose -f build/dev/docker-compose.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.

To run SIPA wihout Docker you can do the following:

# Create an venv
python -m venv venv

# Activate the venv
. venv/bin/activate[.fish|.csh]

# Install the dependencies
sudo apt install libpq-dev  # For Debian based distributions
sudo dnf install libpq-devel # For Fedora
pip install -r requirements.txt

# Run SIPA with flask
flask run

Is there any more documentation?

Sipa provides documentation via sphinx (ergo, docstrings). At the moment, there is no automatic pushing to here, so you need to do it locally by running make docs and make show_docs, which opens an http server at docs/build/html.

Editing documentation

The documentation is defined in rst files in docs/src. The largest part consists of automatic inclusion of module documentation using .. automodule::.

How can I run the tests?

For testing, there exists the docker-compose file build/testing/docker-compose.yml:

docker-compose -f build/testing/docker-compose.yml up -d
docker-compose -f build/testing/docker-compose.yml run --rm sipa_testing pytest -v

…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.

Translations

Sipa uses flask-babel for translations. To update translations, You should have pybabel and poedit installed (via pip or any other way), and run make translate. Since unfortunately, the build proocess is not automated (or done at the start), you need to check in the changes to the compiled files yourself.

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 the news/ folder(!).

• To include a folder, set the title of the navigation bar with name: as well as its position with rank. Do not forget to set index: 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
icon: bi-person

### 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
icon: bi-emoji-smile
link: https://example.org/
rank: 1

Translations

Make sure you installed Babel via pip. Then, just run make translate.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sipa