valet 0.4

valet is a script that turns any directory into a simple wiki, complete with wikitext rendering, editing, and automatically committing changes to version control.

Introduction

valet is a script that turns any directory into a simple wiki, complete with wikitext rendering, editing, and automatically committing changes to version control.

It’s a single file with no strict requirements aside from [bottle](http://bottlepy.org/).

News

2015-01-03

I got a bee in my bonnet recently on making some improvements to valet, so Merry Christmas to you all.

New features:

• The /view/X, /edit/X, etc. paths have been removed in favor of using URL query arguments, e.g. X?edit and X?delete. CGI/WSGI path prefixes still work fine.

• New file-management-related functionality, like creating new files and deleting files

• Search! A fancy search field will grep through documents and filenames for your query

• Lots of git-related functionality has been added, including:

  • Displaying a dropdown that lets you view an old version of a file

  • Displaying a table with detailed status about the last few changes to a file

• Lots of code cleanup, refactoring, and simplification

• Fixed a ton of bugs

• Lots of code changes to better comply with pylint (score 9.24)

• Added some basic unit/regression tests in tests.py

2012-10-28

I spent some time hacking on valet this weekend, fixing a few bugs and adding one big new feature: CGI/WSGI support. Now if you link or rename valet to something.cgi or something.fcgi, it will “Do The Right Thing” and operate as a proper webapp. (WSGI support requires [flup](http://trac.saddi.com/flup).)

This feature was required for me to run valet as a lightweight wiki on my DreamHost server without interfering in that environment by opening a new port or leaving a long-running service around. I didn’t add a configuration interface; if you’re going to be linking or renaming the script, open it up and change the options hard-coded near the top.

Other changes and new features:

• Added a mime query argument to override the automatic filetype detection.

  • You can use this if, for instance, you have a Python script without the “.py” extension; add ?mime=text/x-python to get it properly syntax-colored anyway.

• Added support for arbitrary URL prefixes.

  • This just works automatically; valet will figure out where you put it and prepend that to all of the links instead of hardcoding “/view” etc.

    • This doesn’t work super-well with Apache’s mod_rewrite; it basically ignores the rewrite headers. This is a limitation of bottle but I’m not sure how to do it better anyway.

Fixes:

• Added proper support for empty “edit” and “post” routes with a slash at the end (now it will complain about no file being provided instead of saying the route doesn’t exist)

• Fixed an error output that caused problems when running as a CGI (now writes to stderr)

Usage

$ valet

Or, use some command line options:

$ valet [-d <path>] [-p <port>] [-r] [-s] [-v]

By default, valet serves $CWD; change this with -d <path>. Other options:

• -r: set readonly mode and disable editing

• -s: set simple mode and disable all special-case processing (pygments, wikitext rendering, etc.)

• -v: automatically commit edits into version control if possible

  • Currently only git is supported.

Installation

$ pip install valet

Requirements

• Python 2.6+

• [bottle](http://bottlepy.org/)

Tested on:

• Centos 5.4 (python 2.6)

• Debian 6.0.4 (python 2.6)

• Gentoo (python 2.7)

• Mac OS X 10.7 (python 2.7)

• Ubuntu 12.04.1 (python 2.7)

• Windows 7 (python 2.7)

Optional Components

valet supports lots of useful modules, which will be automatically enabled if present:

• [python-magic](http://pypi.python.org/pypi/python-magic/): Better automatic file type detection

• [Markdown](http://pypi.python.org/pypi/Markdown/): Render “markdown” wikitext in files

• [python-creole](http://pypi.python.org/pypi/python-creole/): Render “creole” wikitext in files

• [textile](http://pypi.python.org/pypi/textile): Render “textile” wikitext in files

• [docutils](http://pypi.python.org/pypi/docutils/): Render “reStructuredText” wikitext in files

• [pygments](http://pypi.python.org/pypi/Pygments): Adds syntax highlighting for source code files

Use the -s/–simple command-line option to disable these optional components.

Known Issues

• There’s no security anywhere here; please, whatever you do, DON’T make this available over the Internet. valet has a readonly mode and attempts to jail reads and edits into its root directory, but be careful!

• bottle’s static_file function doesn’t appear to handle UTF-8 data properly, or at least it doesn’t show up right when I load a file that way.

• The version of python-magic that ships with Ubuntu [is broken](https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/603128); I worked around it as best I could.