Manage your project web site

Some notes moved from various documents - please help to enhance...

To see how your project website is handled:

$ ssh people.apache.org
$ cd /www
$ ls -l

These are the sites for each top-level project. These are the generated documents that are served as static files (except for some special CGIs and .htaccess rules).

It is up to your projects how the website is generated and what software is used. The basic requirements for site management are that only committers should be able to modify the site and that notifications of all site changes should be sent to the relevant project mailing lists.

Typically these requirements are satisfied by keeping the site sources (and often the generated site) in the Subversion repository. If your project does this, you can update your website by generating the site and committing the results to svn. Then login to people.apache.org and run: ' umask 002 && svn update /www/$tlp.apache.org ' (or add a cronjob to do that).

These sites are rsync'ed into production every hour. Deletes happen once per day.

If your site uses svnpubsub then there is never a need to login to people.apache.org or any other ASF machine or to wait for some cron job to fire. Sites that use the CMS also use svnpubsub.

How do I preview my project website?

You can view your changes before they go into production by using a trick with your web browser. Temporarily set the preferences to use 140.211.11.10:80 as your HTTP proxy. Beware: that IP address might change at some time - if so then please send a patch for this doc.

For CMS sites, just commit the changes (without "publish"-ing them) and browse to http://TLP.staging.apache.org/. (For example, the staging version of this page.)

How do I set the correct file ownership and protections?

Note: deprecated, this is a non-issue for svnpubsub-managed sites.

Note that sites are owned by your project group, so be sure that each committer has properly configured their UNIX account and especially their umask (0002 is advised), otherwise the file permissions will be incorrect and so other committers in your group will be prevented. Whenever you create files on the server, ensure that the files all belong to the relevant group, that the files are read/write (664) and that the directories are read/write (775) by the group.

There is an effort to coordinate improved site management. Any committer can join the site-dev list to help.

How do I edit my project website?

The websites are served from directories under /www/ on people.apache.org. But you usually do not edit any content in those directories. Each website is an anonymous checkout of a source module on the source repository (svn.apache.org) - for example, the www.apache.org site is an anonymous checkout of infrastructure/site/trunk/docs. The exception to this rule is the software distributions, which are not kept in version control.

Then to update websites, you should commit to the appropriate SVN repository ('svn info' to find out which one). Then do a svn update in the appropriate directory under /www/ to bring the content on www.apache.org up to date.

For svnpubsub-managed site this is the only way, and the svn update is done automatically.

Can I control the configuration of my project website?

Yes, the central config file allows you to use .htaccess files in your website directories to control configuration. Of course, reading and parsing an .htaccess file on each request can slow down the server, so you should consider requesting an adjustment in the central config file for permanent configuration changes.

How does logging work?

Each day's error and access logs are kept in www.apache.org:/x1/logs/www/. They are shuffled off each night to a directory under people.apache.org:/x1/logarchive/ and are then periodically archived to other media.

No formal log analysis is performed, but you are free to grab the logs and do whatever analysis you would like.

Do project sites have to use the CMS?

No. It's recommended but not required. (More information and reference about the Apache CMS.)

Do project sites have to use svnpubsub?

Yes. Infrastructure will mandate transition to svnpubsub over the next year. (svnpubsub technically requires the generated site files to be in a Subversion tree somewhere. For CMS users this tree will be the CMS build output tree.)

Can my project site use its own favicon? We're seeing an Apache Feather.

Yes, just add a favicon.ico file to your site's root. The feather is only used for project sites that don't have a favicon.ico file.