Winter 2011 Handout - Package the Weave Server

Status

This page status is: DRAFT.

Title

Package the Weave Server

Participants

Justin Morgan

Introduction

Weave is the server used by Mozilla Sync for synchronizing personal data (bookmarks, passwords, form values, and cookies) across multiple machines and architectures (Windows/Linux, Android, etc).

The project has involved packaging Weave for the purposes of getting it included with the official Fedora repos. In order to do this the package has to successfully pass through the package review process.

Packaging Weave is significant as it allows individuals, groups, and companies to more easily run their own private weave server.

The goals for the project milestones thus far have been:

• 0.1 - Documentation for the manual installation of Weave server.
• 0.2 - Initial package release tested with mock and koji. Bugzilla request submitted for package review process.
• 0.3 - Package completes review process and is ready for inclusion in the official Fedora repos.

Approach

The approach all along for the project has been to streamline the MySQL and Apache configuration required for setting up Weave. Because of this certain functionality is not enabled in the config files, such as SSL and Captcha.

For the MySQL streamlining a script has been developed for inclusion in the package to automate the creation of a database, three tables, and service account required for Weave to function. You can download/view the script here: [1].

The approach for the Apache config was to avoid touching the main httpd.conf file. To do this the package installs the weave.conf file in /etc/httpd/conf.d/ which the service will pick up after a successful restart. As SSL is not enabled in the packaged version the weave.conf consists only of Alias configuration and not SSL virtualhost.

Links

Project Wiki - Package the Weave Server Justin's Blog