Configuration¶
Contents
INI File¶
Kotti is configured using an INI configuration file.
The Installation section explains how to get hold of a sample configuration file.
The [app:kotti] section in it might look like this:
[app:kotti]
use = egg:Kotti
pyramid.reload_templates = true
pyramid.debug_authorization = false
pyramid.debug_notfound = false
pyramid.debug_routematch = false
pyramid.debug_templates = true
pyramid.default_locale_name = en
pyramid.includes = pyramid_debugtoolbar
pyramid_tm
mail.default_sender = yourname@yourhost
sqlalchemy.url = sqlite:///%(here)s/Kotti.db
kotti.site_title = Kotti
kotti.secret = changethis1
Various aspects of your site can be changed right here.
Overview of settings¶
This table provides an overview of available settings.
All these settings must go into the [app:kotti] section of your Paste Deploy configuration file.
Only the settings in bold letters required. The rest has defaults.
Do take a look at the required settings (in bold) and adjust them in your site’s configuration. A few of the settings are less important, and sometimes only used by developers, not integrators.
| Setting | Description |
|---|---|
| kotti.site_title | The title of your site |
| kotti.secret | Secret token used for the initial admin password |
| kotti.secret2 | Secret token used for email password reset token |
| sqlalchemy.url | SQLAlchemy database URL |
| mail.default_sender | Sender address for outgoing email |
| kotti.asset_overrides | Override Kotti’s templates |
| kotti.authn_policy_factory | Component used for authentication |
| kotti.authz_policy_factory | Component used for authorization |
| kotti.available_types | List of active content types |
| kotti.base_includes | List of base Python configuration hooks |
| kotti.caching_policy_chooser | Component for choosing the cache header policy |
| kotti.configurators | List of advanced functions for config |
| kotti.date_format | Date format to use, default: medium |
| kotti.datetime_format | Datetime format to use, default: medium |
| kotti.depot.*.* | Configure the blob storage. More details below |
| kotti.fanstatic.edit_needed | List of static resources used for edit interface |
| kotti.fanstatic.view_needed | List of static resources used for public interface |
| kotti.login_success_callback | Override Kotti’s default login_success_callback function |
| kotti.max_file_size | Max size for file uploads, default: 10 (MB) |
| kotti.modification_date_excludes | List of attributes in dotted name notation that should not trigger an update of modification_date on change |
| kotti.populators | List of functions to fill initial database |
| kotti.request_factory | Override Kotti’s default request factory |
| kotti.reset_password_callback | Override Kotti’s default reset_password_callback function |
| kotti.root_factory | Override Kotti’s default Pyramid root factory |
| kotti.sanitize_on_write | Configure Sanitizers to be used on write access to resource objects |
| kotti.sanitizers | Configure available Sanitizers |
| kotti.search_content | Override Kotti’s default search function |
| kotti.session_factory | Component used for sessions |
| kotti.templates.api | Override api object available in templates |
| kotti.time_format | Time format to use, default: medium |
| kotti.url_normalizer | Component used for url normalization |
| kotti.zcml_includes | List of packages to include the ZCML from |
| mail.host | Email host to send from |
| pyramid.default_locale_name | Set the user interface language, default en |
| pyramid.includes | List of Python configuration hooks |
kotti.secret and kotti.secret2¶
The value of kotti.secret will define the initial password of the admin user.
Thus, if you define kotti.secret = mysecret, the admin password will be mysecret.
Log in and change the password at any time through the web interface.
The kotti.secret token is also used for signing browser session cookies.
The kotti.secret2 token is used for signing the password reset token.
Here’s an example:
kotti.secret = myadminspassword
kotti.secret2 = $2a$12$VVpW/i1MA2wUUIUHwY6v8O
Note
Do not use these values in your site
Override templates (kotti.asset_overrides)¶
In your settings file, set kotti.asset_overrides to a list of asset specifications.
This allows you to set up a directory in your package that will mirror Kotti’s own and that allows you to override Kotti’s templates on a case by case basis.
As an example, image that we wanted to override Kotti’s master layout template.
Inside the Kotti source, the layout template is located at kotti/templates/view/master.pt.
To override this, we would add a directory to our own package called kotti-overrides and therein put our own version of the template so that the full path to our own custom template is mypackage/kotti-overrides/templates/view/master.pt.
We can then register our kotti-overrides directory by use of the kotti.asset_overrides setting, like so:
kotti.asset_overrides = mypackage:kotti-overrides/
Use add-ons¶
Add-ons will usually include in their installation instructions which settings one should modify to activate them. Configuration settings that are used to activate add-ons are:
pyramid.includeskotti.available_typeskotti.base_includeskotti.configurators
pyramid.includes¶
pyramid.includes defines a list of hooks that will be called when your Kotti app starts up.
This gives the opportunity to third party packages to add registrations to the Pyramid Configurator API in order to configure views and more.
Here’s an example. Let’s install the kotti_twitter extension and add a Twitter profile widget to the right column of all pages. First we install the package from PyPI:
bin/pip install kotti_twitter
Then we activate the add-on in our site by editing the pyramid.includes setting in the [app:kotti] section of our INI file (if a line with pyramid.includes does not exist, add it).
pyramid.includes = kotti_twitter.include_profile_widget
kotti_twitter also asks us to configure the Twitter widget itself, so we add some more lines right where we were:
kotti_twitter.profile_widget.user = dnouri
kotti_twitter.profile_widget.loop = true
The order in which the includes are listed matters.
For example, when you add two slots on the right hand side, the order in which you list them in pyramid.includes will control the order in which they will appear.
As an example, here’s a configuration with which the search widget will be displayed above the profile widget:
pyramid.includes =
kotti_twitter.include_search_widget
kotti_twitter.include_profile_widget
Read more about including packages using ‘pyramid.includes’ in the Pyramid documentation.
kotti.available_types¶
The kotti.available_types setting defines the list of content types available.
The default configuration here is:
kotti.available_types = kotti.resources.Document kotti.resources.File
An example that removes File and adds two content types:
kotti.available_types =
kotti.resources.Document
kotti_calendar.resources.Calendar
kotti_calendar.resources.Event
kotti.populators¶
The default configuration here is:
kotti.populators = kotti.populate.populate
Populators are functions with no arguments that get called on system startup.
They may then make automatic changes to the database (before calling transaction.commit()).
kotti.search_content¶
Kotti provides a simple search over the content types based on kotti.resources.Content. The default configuration here is:
kotti.search_content = kotti.views.util.default_search_content
You can provide an own search function in an add-on and register this in your INI file. The return value of the search function is a list of dictionaries, each representing a search result:
[{'title': 'Title of search result 1',
'description': 'Description of search result 1',
'path': '/path/to/search-result-1'},
{'title': 'Title of search result 2',
'description': 'Description of search result 2',
'path': '/path/to/search-result-2'},
...
]
An add-on that defines an alternative search function is kotti_solr, which provides an integration with the Solr search engine.
Configure the user interface language¶
By default, Kotti will display its user interface in English. The default configuration is:
pyramid.default_locale_name = en
You can configure Kotti to serve a German user interface by saying:
pyramid.default_locale_name = de_DE
The list of available languages is here.
Configure authentication and authorization¶
You can override the authentication and authorization policy that Kotti uses. By default, Kotti uses these factories:
kotti.authn_policy_factory = kotti.authtkt_factory
kotti.authz_policy_factory = kotti.acl_factory
These settings correspond to pyramid.authentication.AuthTktAuthenticationPolicy and pyramid.authorization.ACLAuthorizationPolicy being used.
Sessions¶
The kotti.session_factory configuration variable allows the overriding of the default session factory.
By default, Kotti uses pyramid_beaker for sessions.
Caching¶
You can override Kotti’s default set of cache headers by changing the kotti.views.cache.caching_policies dictionary, which maps policies to headers.
E.g. the Cache Resource entry there caches all static resources for 32 days.
You can also choose which responses match to which caching policy by overriding Kotti’s default cache policy chooser through the use of the kotti.caching_policy_chooser configuration variable.
The default is:
kotti.caching_policy_chooser = kotti.views.cache.default_caching_policy_chooser
URL normalization¶
Kotti normalizes document titles to URLs by replacing language specific characters like umlauts or accented characters with its ascii equivalents.
You can change this default behavour by setting kotti.url_normalizer.map_non_ascii_characters configuration variable to False.
If you do, Kotti will leave national characters in URLs.
You may also replace default component used for url normalization by setting kotti.url_normalizer configuation variable.
The default configuration here is:
kotti.url_normalzier = kotti.url_normalizer.url_normalizer
kotti.url_normalizer.map_non_ascii_characters = True
Blob storage configuration¶
By default, Kotti will store blob data (files uploaded in File and Image instances) in the database.
Internally, Kotti integrates with filedepot, so it is possible to use any filedepot compatible storage, including those provided by filedepot itself:
depot.io.local.LocalFileStoragedepot.io.awss3.S3Storagedepot.io.gridfs.GridFSStorage
The default storage for Kotti is DBFileStorage.
The benefit of storing files in DBFileStorage is having all content in a single place (the DB) which makes backups, exporting and importing of your site’s data easy, as long as you don’t have too many or too large files.
The downsides of this approach appear when your database server resides on a different host (network performance becomes a greater issue) or your DB dumps become too large to be handled efficiently.
To configure a depot, several kotti.depot.*.* lines need to be added.
The number in the first position is used to group backend configuration and to order the file storages in the configuration of filedepot.
The depot configured with number 0 will be the default depot, where all new blob data will be saved.
There are 2 options that are required for every storage configuration: name and backend.
The name is a unique string that will be used to identify the path of saved files (it is recorded with each blob info), so once configured for a particular storage, it should never change.
The backend should point to a dotted path for the storage class.
Then, any number of keyword arguments can be added, and they will be passed to the backend class on initialization.
Example of a possible configurationi that stores blob data on the disk, in
/var/local/files using the filedepot depot.io.local.LocalFileStorage provided backend.
Kotti’s default backend, DBFileStorage has been moved to position 1 and all data stored there will continue to be available.
See Working with blob data in Kotti to see how to migrate blob data between storages.
kotti.depot.0.name = localfs
kotti.depot.0.backend = depot.io.local.LocalFileStorage
kotti.depot.0.storage_path = /var/local/files
kotti.depot.1.name = dbfiles
kotti.depot.1.backend = kotti.filedepot.DBFileStorage