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Using MoinMoin with Twisted

Twisted is an event-driven networking framework for many kinds of applications. For MoinMoin Twisted is used as a web server that just imports MoinMoin persistently. This has the advantage that the Python interpreter and all Python scripts (including Twisted itself and also MoinMoin) is only loaded and initialized one time, and that data can be cached in memory from request to request, enhancing the performance of MoinMoin.

Besides the general installation you need 3 files:

  1. the script /path/to/cgi-dir/mointwisted (see "Starting the server" below)

  2. the webserver script file like mointwisted.py (which needs to be in the same directory where your working directory is).

  3. the configuration file like /path/to/wikiconfig-dir/wikiconfig.py

Contents

  1. Using MoinMoin with Twisted
    1. Install Twisted
    2. Configuring the Twisted server
      1. System path configuration
      2. Config class options
    3. Configuring wikiconfig.py
    4. Starting the server
      1. on Unix
      2. on Windows
        1. A windows service runner written in Python

Install Twisted

First, install Twisted (see URL above). Many Linux distributions have Twisted packages. Please refer to the documentation of Twisted for installation information.

Configuring the Twisted server

Copy the file wiki/server/mointwisted.py to your wiki directory. Edit and adapt the settings to your needs.

System path configuration

If you did a standard install, and you are not a developer, you probably want to skip this section. Otherwise, you might want to add the path to moin and config file, like that: 

sys.path.insert(0, '/path/to/moin')
sys.path.insert(0, '/path/to/wikiconfig')

Config class options

If you did a standard install, the default options might be just what you need. Check and change what you like:

Option

Default

Comment

docs

'/usr/share/moin/wiki/htdocs'

Path to moin shared files

user

'www-data'

If you run as root, the server will run as this user

group

'www-data'

If you run as root, the server will run as this group

port

8080

Port to serve. To serve a privileged port below 1024 you will have to run as root

interfaces

['']

A list of interfaces the server will listen to. If the list contains the entry '' (like for the default configuration), all other entries are ignored and the server will listen to all interfaces.

logPath

'mointwisted.log'

Log file.

profiler

commented python code

Useful only if you are a moin developer.

Configuring wikiconfig.py

The sample config file should be just fine.

Don't change url_prefix_static as the default value is hardcoded in the Twisted server.

Starting the server

on Unix

On GNU/Linux, Mac OS X or another POSIX-like OS, copy wiki/server/mointwisted to your wiki directory. You might want to adapt PYTHONPATH and the path to twistd.

Start the server with ./mointwisted start and test your wiki at http://localhost:8080/. Stop the server with ./mointwisted stop.

For more options run ./mointwisted without arguments.

If you want to start the server via initscript make sure mointwisted finds montwisted.py on startup!

on Windows

Copy wiki/server/mointwisted.cmd to your wiki directory. You might have to change the path pointing to the python-scripts directory.

Double click mointwisted.cmd to start the server. It will create a new terminal window. To stop the server, close the terminal window.

A windows service runner written in Python

I have written a service runner to help configuring a windows service to run, because I prefer to run moin using Twisted.

Usage:

  1. install pywin32
  2. download servicerunner.py
  3. modify the "mointwisted" and "mointwisted_dir" according to your system
  4. run "servicerunner.py install" on the command line

servicerunner.py