HelpContents > HelpOnAdministration > HelpOnConfiguration

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Configuration of MoinMoin

MoinMoin is configured by changing the moin_config.py file, which normally sits besides your moin.cgi driver script. moin_config.py is imported by the MoinMoin main code early in a request cycle and is found because the current directory (i.e. that of moin.cgi) is part of the Python system path. Consequently, moin_config.py can sit anywhere in your PYTHONPATH.

Overview of configuration options

The following table contains default values and a short description for all configuration variables. Most of these can be left at their defaults, those you need to change with every installation are listed in the sample moin_config.py that comes with the distribution.

Variable name

Default

Description

LogStore

'text:editlog'

Experimental, keep the default

SecurityPolicy

None

class object hook for implementing security restrictions

<ac:structured-macro ac:name="unmigrated-wiki-markup" ac:schema-version="1" ac:macro-id="0ad7cbc3-4726-4976-a7cd-0e5141174a4c"><ac:plain-text-body><![CDATA[

allow_extended_names

1

true to enable ["non-standard wikiname"] markup

]]></ac:plain-text-body></ac:structured-macro>

allow_subpages

1

true to enable hierarchical wiki features (see HelpOnEditing SubPages)

allow_numeric_entities

1

if true, numeric entities like € for € are not escaped, but & and stuff still is

allow_xslt

0

true to enable XSLT processing via 4Suite (note that this enables anyone with enough know-how to insert arbitrary HTML into your wiki, which is why it defaults to 0)

<ac:structured-macro ac:name="unmigrated-wiki-markup" ac:schema-version="1" ac:macro-id="f48daeb9-25db-4ef9-8ff2-ec175aca2fee"><ac:plain-text-body><![CDATA[

allowed_actions

[]

allow unsafe actions (list of strings)

]]></ac:plain-text-body></ac:structured-macro>

attachments

None

If None, send attachments via CGI; else this has to be a dictionary with the path to attachment storage (key dir) and the equivalent URL prefix to that same dir (key url)

backtick_meta

1

true to enable {{inline literal}} markup

bang_meta

0

true to enable NoWikiName markup

<ac:structured-macro ac:name="unmigrated-wiki-markup" ac:schema-version="1" ac:macro-id="545ef28a-a3bf-4982-9fc0-1046a09e17de"><ac:plain-text-body><![CDATA[

changed_time_fmt

'  [%H:%M]'

Time format used on [RecentChanges] for page edits within the last 24 hours

]]></ac:plain-text-body></ac:structured-macro>

charset

'iso-8859-1'

The encoding / character set your system uses

check_i18n

0

Set to 1 only in development systems, or on a translator's system

css_url

"<url_prefix>/css/moinmoin.css"

URL for the default CSS definitions, make this a server-relative URL (start with a slash)

data_dir

'./data/'

Path to the data directory, the default is OK if you place the data directory right besides your moin.cgi

date_fmt

'%Y-%m-%d'

System date format, used mostly in RecentChanges

datetime_fmt

'%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S'

Default format for dates and times (when the user has no preferences or chose the "default" date format)

default_lang

'en'

default language for page contents, and also the default user language if not set by other means

default_markup

'wiki'

Default page parser / format (name of module in MoinMoin.parser)

edit_locking

'warn 10'

Editor locking policy: None, 'warn <timeout in minutes>', or 'lock <timeout in minutes>'

edit_rows

30

Default height of the edit box

external_diff

'diff'

Allows you to set an exact path to the command, or change the name to for example "gdiff" if GNU diff is not a native command in your UNIX flavour

<ac:structured-macro ac:name="unmigrated-wiki-markup" ac:schema-version="1" ac:macro-id="bdaf16e2-687c-45f1-a6f9-d7ea42ac0202"><ac:plain-text-body><![CDATA[

hosts_deny

[]

List of denied IPs; if an IP ends with a dot, it denies a whole subnet (class A, B or C)

]]></ac:plain-text-body></ac:structured-macro>

html_head

META-Tag with Content-Type

Additional <HEAD> tags for all pages (see HelpOnSkins)

html_head_queries

META-Tag with "NOINDEX,NOFOLLOW" for robots

Additional <HEAD> tags for edit and action pages (html_head is sent, too; see HelpOnSkins)

html_pagetitle

None

Allows you to set a specific HTML page title (if not set, it defaults to the value of sitename)

httpd_docs

'./wiki-moinmoin'

directory with public files, when using the stand-alone server

httpd_host

'localhost'

hostname of the stand-alone server

httpd_port

8080

port of the stand-alone server

httpd_user

'nobody'

user to run the stand-alone server under (UNIX only)

interwikiname

None

InterWiki name (prefix, moniker) of the site, or None

logo_string

'<img src="%s" border="0" alt="%s">' % (logo_url, sitename)

The img tag used to format the logo display in the upper-left corner of a page and used in RSS documents

logo_url

MoinMoin logo

The URL path to the logo used by logo_string above

lowerletters

Latin 1 alphabetic characters and digits

Lowercase letters, used to define what is a WikiName

mail_from

None

From: header used in sent mails

mail_smarthost

None

IP or domain name of an SMTP-enabled server; note that email features (notification, mailing of login data) works only if this variable is set

max_macro_size

50

Maximum size of some macro pages in KB, especially used to limits the size of RecentChanges; use 0 to disable that feature

<ac:structured-macro ac:name="unmigrated-wiki-markup" ac:schema-version="1" ac:macro-id="36eb05f0-368f-4265-a18c-5e3972f24bb9"><ac:plain-text-body><![CDATA[

navi_bar

list of default quick links

Most important links in text form (these links can be over-ridden by the user's quick links); to link to any URL, use a free-form link of the form "[url text]"

]]></ac:plain-text-body></ac:structured-macro>

nonexist_qm

0

Default for displaying WantedPages with a question mark, like in the original wiki (changeable by the user)

<ac:structured-macro ac:name="unmigrated-wiki-markup" ac:schema-version="1" ac:macro-id="08c67454-f6c3-4b49-9054-b7ca32a14ed6"><ac:plain-text-body><![CDATA[

page_category_regex

'^Category[A-Z]'

Pages matching this regex are regarded as Wiki categories

]]></ac:plain-text-body></ac:structured-macro>

page_footer1

Python Powered logo

Custom HTML markup sent before the system footer (see HelpOnSkins)

page_footer2

""

Custom HTML markup sent after the system footer (see HelpOnSkins)

<ac:structured-macro ac:name="unmigrated-wiki-markup" ac:schema-version="1" ac:macro-id="d2829e1d-9e9f-48f1-9dfc-794c84af3689"><ac:plain-text-body><![CDATA[

page_form_regex

'[a-z]Form$'

Pages matching this regex are regarded as containing form definitions

]]></ac:plain-text-body></ac:structured-macro>

page_front_page

'FrontPage'

Name of the front page

page_icons

large HTML fragment

The top-right icons on each page

page_icons_up

icon for link to parent

This icon is shown on subpages and links to the parent page

page_local_spelling_words

'LocalSpellingWords'

Name of the page containing user-provided spellchecker words

<ac:structured-macro ac:name="unmigrated-wiki-markup" ac:schema-version="1" ac:macro-id="cf9edd14-7f9d-4fb7-addc-2886d1f59f50"><ac:plain-text-body><![CDATA[

page_template_regex

'[a-z]Template$'

Pages matching this regex are regarded as templates for new pages

]]></ac:plain-text-body></ac:structured-macro>

shared_intermap

None

path to a file containing global InterWiki definitions (or a list of such filenames)

shared_metadb

None

path to a file containing a global InterWiki pagelist (not yet implemented)

show_hosts

1

true to show hostname in RecentChanges

show_section_numbers

1

true to show section numbers in headings by default

show_timings

0

used for development

show_version

0

show MoinMoin's version at the bottom of each page

sitename

'An Unnamed MoinMoin Wiki'

Short description of your wiki site, displayed below the logo on each page, and used in RSS documents as the channel title

smileys

{}

User-defined smileys (a dict with the markup as the key and a tuple of width, height, border, image name as the value)

title1

None

HTML fragment before title area (see HelpOnSkins)

title2

'<hr>'

HTML fragment after title area (see HelpOnSkins)

trail_size

5

Number of pages in the trail of visited pages

ua_spiders

...

google

wget

...

A regex of HTTP_USER_AGENTs that should be excluded from logging

umask

0777

umask used on all open(), mkdir() and similar calls

upperletters

Latin 1 alphabetic characters

Uppercase letters, used to define what is a WikiName

url_mappings

{}

lookup table to remap URL prefixes (dict of 'prefix': 'replacement'); especially useful in intranets, when whole trees of externally hosted documents move around

url_prefix

'/wiki'

Used as the base URL for all public documents served by the wiki, especially the image files for the icons

<ac:structured-macro ac:name="unmigrated-wiki-markup" ac:schema-version="1" ac:macro-id="67b83163-dc95-468c-bab7-44735efd32d5"><ac:plain-text-body><![CDATA[

url_schemas

[]

additional URL schemas you want to have recognized (list of strings)

]]></ac:plain-text-body></ac:structured-macro>

Changing character sets

If you want to use MoinMoin with a character set other than Latin-1, you might or even have to change the default character sets for WikiName``s in "moin_config.py". A safe default is US-ASCII, i.e. 

upperletters = "A-Z"
lowerletters = "0-9a-z"

With that setting, you need to set "allow_extended_names=1" and use the special markup for extended WikiName{{`s }}["extended name"]` to get any names with characters outside the core latin alphabet.

File attachments

The AttachFile action lets a page have multiple attached files. Since file uploads could be abused for DoS (Denial of Service) attacks, AttachFile is an action that has to be enabled by the wiki administrator. To do this, add "allowed_actions = ['AttachFile']" to your configuration file.

There are also two storage/retrieval models for file attachments:
1. attachments are stored "privately" and can only be retrieved via a CGI GET (via URLs like http://wiki.net/moin/SomePage?action=AttachFile&do=get&target=filename.ext).
1. attachments are stored into a directory directly accessible by the web server, and can thus be served directly by the webserver, without any invocation of MoinMoin (leading to URLs like http://wiki.net/wiki/mywiki/SomePage/attachments/filename.ext).

Generally, the second option is preferable 1 , but it also requires additional configuration steps, and possibly more rights on the host machine. Because of that, the first option is the default; attachments are stored in the "data" directory, with paths like "<data>/pages/<pagename>/attachments/<filename>".

For the second option, you need to add an attachments option to your configuration, which is a dictionary of two values: 

attachments = {
    'dir': 'C:/Moin/share/moin/htdocs/mywiki',
    'url': '/wiki/mywiki',
}

dir is the file system path to the attachment storage, and url is the matching URI to get access to that directory. That directory has to exist and be writable for the webserver, so it can create the necessary directories and files for new attachments. Note that you have to manually create this directory, MoinMoin will not create it for you.

The above example shows a typical configuration for Windows that works for an installation according to the default setup procedure (see HelpOnInstalling ApacheOnWin32). For UNIX, if you followed HelpOnInstalling ApacheOnUnix, the necessary configuration will look like this: 

attachments = {
    'dir': '/usr/local/share/moin/htdocs/mywiki',
    'url': '/wiki/mywiki',
}

After you have completed the configuration changes, try to create an attachment for WikiSandBox to check for any errors. If you have any permission problems, you will likely see a Python traceback or some error message.

  1. Such a configuration will lead to lower server loads, since you avoid the overhead of a CGI process for every attachment download. ↩

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