sharepointcacheprimer 1.0b3.post5

Overview

The first time a browser hits a sharepoint site after a restart, the caches are empty, so the page can take a while to load. One can script something to silently hit a sharepoint web-frontend, causing it to build caches and preventing any real people from experiencing that.

This tool does this for a specific circumstance where it’s kind of hard to script it without better tools - where normal NTML authentication doesn’t work, because there is ADFSv3 authentication configured, and where there may be a number of web-frontends behind a load balancer.

I don’t know why this is required. I’m not a sharepoint admin. Maybe it’s an artifact of a particular setup.

Installation

This may work in Python 2, but many distributions of Python 2 do not include urllib that has SNI support. Since this is a sysadmin tool, you probably want it to “just work”, so “just use Python 3.4”.

Simple install: pip install sharepointcacheprimer

Usage

The pypi package installs an executable in the standard python location, called ‘sharepointcacheprimer‘.

usage: sharepointcacheprimer [-h] config site [site ...]
example: sharepointcacheprimer myconfig.ini mysite.com mysite2.com

This will connect to a sharepoint site, authenticate and load a page silently. It is suited to running as a cronjob/scheduled task.

The configuration file is formatted as a .ini. The packages ships with an example file that is installed in PYTHONROOT/doc/, and described below.

Configuration

>From the included doc/example.ini

Each section is either a site definition or a cookieset definition.

[example.com]               ; Site: example.com
username = domain\user1     ; ADFS username
password = password1        ; ADFS password
url = http://example.com    ; URL that for site to prime
cookielist = examplecookies ; Optional sectionname for Cookie Sets

[examplecookies]            ; The label referenced above
LB-COOKIE = abc1,abc2,abc3  ; A cookie list, comma-delimited