plinth1FreedomBoxplinth
a web front end for administering FreedomBox
plinthSERVER_DIRapplicationapplicationapplicationDescription
FreedomBox is a community project to develop, design and promote
personal servers running free software for private, personal
communications. It is a networking appliance designed to allow
interfacing with the rest of the Internet under conditions of
protected privacy and data security. It hosts applications such
as blog, wiki, website, social network, email, web proxy and a
Tor relay on a device that can replace a wireless router so that
data stays with the users.
Plinth is a web interface to administer the functions of the
FreedomBox. It is extensible and is made of modules. Each
module provides a simplified user interface to control the
underlying functionality of a specific application of
FreedomBox. As FreedomBox can act as a wireless router, it is
possible to configure networking from Plinth. Plinth allows
configuration of basic system parameters such as time zone,
hostname and automatic upgrade settings.
Options
This the URL fragment under which Plinth will provide its
services. By default the value from
plinth.config is used. Plinth is
shipped with a value of /plinth in
/etc/plinth/plinth.config. This
means that Plinth will be available as
http://localhost:8000/plinth by default.
When /etc/plinth/plinth.config is not
available, plinth.config from the current
working directory is used.
Enable development mode. Use plinth.config and the actions_dir
of the current working directory. Enables extra debug messages,
enable Django debug mode for detailed error pages and and turn off
Django security features. Monitor source files for changes and
restart Plinth on modifications. Die if there is an error during
module initialization.
If provided, Plinth loads modules, performs initialization
but does start the web server. Instead it runs diagnostic
tests on each module and exits.
Perform application setup operations and exit. Setting up
an application involves installing packages required for
that application and performing pre and post install
configuration setups. If no application is provided,
setup all applications which describe themselves as
essential. If a list of applications is provided, setup
only those applications.
Same as but no new Debian
packages are installed during setup. When a package needs
to be installed, a check is done to make sure the package
is already installed. If the package is already
installed, no upgrade is performed and setup skips this
step and proceeds to next operation. If the package is
not installed an error is raised and setup process halts.
This is option is useful for running setup during post
installation script of a Debian package. Essential
packages are added as dependencies for the Debian package
and then setup process is executed from post install
script of the Debian package.
For the list of provided applications, print the list of
packages needed by the applications. If no application is
provided as additional argument, then print list of
packages needed by all essential applications. If '*' is
provided in the list of the applications, then list of
packages needed by all applications will be printed.
Although, packages are installed when the application is
first accessed, this list will be useful for adding list
of dependencies to a Debian package and to get a list of
all interesting packages. Other output may be printed on
stderr and should be ignored.
Configuration
Plinth reads various configuraiton options from the file
/etc/plinth/plinth.config. If this file is
not present, then it reads configuration file
./plinth.config from the current directory.
This is mainly meant to make Plinth work with configuration from
source code directory for debugging purposes.
ExamplesStart Plinth with default options$ plinth
Run Plinth as guided by configuration file.
Run Plinth with different URL prefix$ plinth --server_dir='/myurl'
Run Plinth with the '/myurl' prefix. Note that Apache forwards requests
to '/plinth' by default, so /myurl is not accessible outside of your
FreedomBox without adapting the apache configuration.
Run Plinth in development mode$ plinth --develop
Run in development mode on the terminal. Enable auto-reloading and
more extensive debugging.
Bugs
See Plinth
issue tracker for a full list of known issues and TODO items.
AuthorPlinth DevelopersOriginal author