grokui.admin 0.4

The Grok administration and development UI (base)

grokui.admin: A basic grok admin UI

The replacement for the former grok.admin package.

The internal name of the admin UI is: Grok Application Interface Application or, for short GAIA.

GAIA is itself a Grok application and a subproject to the core Grok development. Its main goal is making developing of Zope 3 and Grok applications a faster and smarter job with more fun for everybody.

Login - what is my username/password?

Before you can use the admin UI, you first must log in.

The username and password of the manager principal (kind of super user) can be found in the file buildout.cfg in the root of your subversion checkout.

In case you do not know, what ‘subversion checkout’ means, look for a file site.zcml in your installation.

Users of grokproject, might find this file in <installdir>/parts/app/site.zcml.

Using the admin-UI

After login you can visit some of the main management topics, as described below:

On top of the admin-UI you can always find three links to the main management activities currently possible with GAIA:

Applications

• List of all instanciated applications

• You can add new instances of Grok applications

• You can rename instances of Grok applications

• For each installed application you can directly call:

  • the object browser (telling you more about this concrete object)

  • the class browser (telling you more about the class of your app)

• For each available application type you can directly call:

  • the class browser (telling you more about the class of your app)

• You can delete your installed applications.

Server

• Set security notifications. Those are by default disabled, because they mean home-calling functionality you may do not want. You can enable/disable those notifications or set a URL to retrieve information about security related problems.

• Start/Restart the server. Caution! This does not work, if the server was started in ‘foreground mode’ (with ‘zopectl fg’).

• Pack the ZODB. This removes old data from the database, freeing up disk space. In a production environment, you might want to pack the ZODB automatically from cron. This can be done using a command like the following:

  curl -q -s -u admin:admin "http://localhost:8080/server?pack=1&days=1"

  which will remove old data older than one day. If you leave out the days parameter, all old data will be removed.

• Get basic information about the running Zope system.

• Enter a message to be displayed on top. You can, for example, leave a message here for your co-admins. To delete the message, just enter the empty string in the appropriate input box.

Documentation

• From here you get starting points to the more elaborated documentation features of Grok, namely:

  • The object browser:

    helps browsing the ZODB and other objects.

  • The class browser:

    gives documentation to classes, packages and other things, which are not instances.

Maintaining grok installations with the admin UI

There are some special info views available especially for the use of system administrators that want to automate Grok administration in some aspects. They provide minimal information about certain topics.

Currently the following infos are available this way:

• The grok version working in background:

  curl -q -s -u admin:admin "http://localhost:8080/@@grokadmin/@@version"

• The security notification (if any):

  curl -q -s -u admin:admin "http://localhost:8080/@@grokadmin/@@secnote"

Beside this you can pack the ZODB databases as described above.

Bugs, Caveats and Ways to Get Help

The Grok admin UI was developed basically during a Google Summer of Code project.

It is still full of bugs.

For bugreports use:

https://launchpad.net/grok

For discussions subscribe to the grok-dev mailing list, hosted on:

http://lists.zope.org.

The projects’ home is the subversion repository at:

http://svn.zope.org/grokui.admin/

Grok’s cave can be found at

http://grok.zope.org/

Enjoy!

grokui.admin changes

0.4 (2009-08-21)

Feature changes

• Added a security notifier to inform users when security issues are published on http://grok.zope.org. The notifier must be explicitly enabled. You can also run your own site/directory to place security notifications.

• Added info views to get important information easier with tools like curl. Supported infos:

  • Grok version used

  • Current security notification (if any).

Bug fixes

• Adapting this package to use the new version of grokcore.view which splits View into CodeView.

• Upgraded the versions to the alpha 4 list to avoid a dependency problem with zope.container versions.

• Include the new grok.View permissions for testing.

0.3.2 (2009-04-10)

• Added dependency for zope.app.preference. This is needed by zope.app.apidoc but not always fetched.

0.3.1 (2009-04-09)

• Fixed missing dependencies in setup.py.

0.3 (2008-12-13)

Feature changes

• Added capability to pack ZODBs (thanks to Jasper Spaans).

0.2 (2008-12-01)

Feature changes

• Added capability to rename apps.

0.1.2 (2008-09-28)

• Made server controls dependent from availability of IServerControl. Otherwise the buttons for restarting or stopping the server process are not rendered.

0.1.1 (2008-08-05)

• Fixed wrong links in docgrok template.

• Fixed ftesting.zcml that did not work with Grok 0.13.

0.1 (2008-07-10)

Feature changes

Initial implementation by factoring out grok.admin from grok.