A DICE TWiki
This is a Wiki which takes advantage of DICE authentication.
TWiki was chosen, because
it seemed to be the only Wiki with real enterprise security features. Whilst I'm not wanting to control edit access
to the pages on the Wiki, being able to tell
who those accesses came from is important. Integration with our
existing KX509 authentication system was important.
TWiki links in with the mod_authssl presentation of the KX509 authentication system without any code changes. As
mod_authssl makes the authenticated user's identity available through the REMOTE_USER enivornment variable, Twiki
is used in straightforward enterprise authentication mode, with access control directives add to the .htaccess file
in the cgi-bin directory.
URL rewriting
In the current incarnation of the Wiki, we use mod_rewrite in order to make the URLs shorter, as follows:
- Firstly, we make the root of the web server the
bin
Twiki cgi-bin directory
- Alias /pub directly to the Twiki /pub directory so that http://example.org/pub/ still works
- In order that the /view/ path component isn't required for every page view, we check the URL - if it doesn't
- correspond to a file present in the current directory, we redirect it to /view/
The Apache magic to do all of this is as follows:
DocumentRoot /var/www/html/twiki/bin
Alias /pub /var/www/html/twiki/pub
<Location />
RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule /pub/(.+) /var/www/html/twiki/pub/$1 [L]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteRule ^(.+) /view%{REQUEST_URI} [L]
</Location>
And Twiki.cfg needs to read:
$defaultUrlHost = "https://wiki.dice.inf.ed.ac.uk";
$scriptUrlPath = "/";
$dispScriptUrlPath = "";
$dispViewPath = "";
$pubUrlPath = "/pub";
Bluesky and upgrade
We've now upgraded to the September 2004 stable release of TWiki, with the addition of the Blueskin theme.
--
SimonWilkinson - 20 Jul 2004