Serving Breezy with Apache

This document describes one way to set up a Breezy HTTP smart server, using Apache 2.0 and FastCGI or mod_python or mod_wsgi.

For more information on the smart server, and other ways to configure it see the main smart server documentation.

Example

You have a webserver already publishing /srv/example.com/www/code as http://example.com/code/… with plain HTTP. It contains branches and directories like /srv/example.com/www/code/branch-one and /srv/example.com/www/code/my-repo/branch-two. You want to provide read-only smart server access to these directories in addition to the existing HTTP access.

Configuring Apache 2.0

FastCGI

First, configure mod_fastcgi, e.g. by adding lines like these to your httpd.conf:

LoadModule fastcgi_module /usr/lib/apache2/modules/mod_fastcgi.so
FastCgiIpcDir /var/lib/apache2/fastcgi

In our example, we’re already serving /srv/example.com/www/code at http://example.com/code, so our existing Apache configuration would look like:

Alias /code /srv/example.com/www/code
<Directory /srv/example.com/www/code>
    Options Indexes
    # ...
</Directory>

We need to change it to handle all requests for URLs ending in .brz/smart. It will look like:

Alias /code /srv/example.com/www/code
<Directory /srv/example.com/www/code>
    Options Indexes FollowSymLinks
    RewriteEngine On
    RewriteBase /code
    RewriteRule ^(.*/)?\.bzr/smart$ /srv/example.com/scripts/brz-smart.fcgi
</Directory>

# brz-smart.fcgi isn't under the DocumentRoot, so Alias it into the URL
# namespace so it can be executed.
Alias /srv/example.com/scripts/brz-smart.fcgi /srv/example.com/scripts/brz-smart.fcgi
<Directory /srv/example.com/scripts>
    Options ExecCGI
    <Files brz-smart.fcgi>
        SetHandler fastcgi-script
    </Files>
</Directory>

This instructs Apache to hand requests for any URL ending with /.brz/smart inside /code to a Breezy smart server via FastCGI.

Refer to the mod_rewrite and mod_fastcgi documentation for further information.

mod_python

First, configure mod_python, e.g. by adding lines like these to your httpd.conf:

LoadModule python_module /usr/lib/apache2/modules/mod_python.so

Define the rewrite rules with mod_rewrite the same way as for FastCGI, except change:

RewriteRule ^(.*/)?\.bzr/smart$ /srv/example.com/scripts/brz-smart.fcgi

to:

RewriteRule ^(.*/)?\.bzr/smart$ /srv/example.com/scripts/brz-smart.py

Like with mod_fastcgi, we also define how our script is to be handled:

Alias /srv/example.com/scripts/brz-smart.py /srv/example.com/scripts/brz-smart.py
<Directory /srv/example.com/scripts>
    <Files brz-smart.py>
        PythonPath "sys.path+['/srv/example.com/scripts']"
        AddHandler python-program .py
        PythonHandler brz-smart::handler
    </Files>
</Directory>

This instructs Apache to hand requests for any URL ending with /.brz/smart inside /code to a Breezy smart server via mod_python.

NOTE: If you don’t have breezy in your PATH, you will be need to change the following line:

PythonPath "sys.path+['/srv/example.com/scripts']"

To:

PythonPath "['/path/to/brz']+sys.path+['/srv/example.com/scripts']"

Refer to the mod_python documentation for further information.

mod_wsgi

First, configure mod_wsgi, e.g. enabling the mod with a2enmod wsgi. We need to change it to handle all requests for URLs ending in .brz/smart. It will look like:

WSGIScriptAliasMatch ^/code/.*/\.bzr/smart$ /srv/example.com/scripts/brz.wsgi

#The three next lines allow regular GETs to work too
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^/code/.*/\.bzr/smart$
RewriteRule ^/code/(.*/\.bzr/.*)$ /srv/example.com/www/code/$1 [L]

<Directory /srv/example.com/www/code>
    WSGIApplicationGroup %{GLOBAL}
</Directory>

This instructs Apache to hand requests for any URL ending with /.brz/smart inside /code to a Breezy smart server via WSGI, and any other URL inside /code to be served directly by Apache.

Refer to the mod_wsgi documentation for further information.

Configuring Breezy

FastCGI

We’ve configured Apache to run the smart server at /srv/example.com/scripts/brz-smart.fcgi. This is just a simple script we need to write to configure a smart server, and glue it to the FastCGI gateway. Here’s what it looks like:

import fcgi
from breezy.transport.http import wsgi

smart_server_app = wsgi.make_app(
    root='/srv/example.com/www/code',
    prefix='/code/',
    path_var='REQUEST_URI',
    readonly=True,
    load_plugins=True,
    enable_logging=True)

fcgi.WSGIServer(smart_server_app).run()

The fcgi module can be found at http://svn.saddi.com/py-lib/trunk/fcgi.py. It is part of flup.

mod_python

We’ve configured Apache to run the smart server at /srv/example.com/scripts/brz-smart.py. This is just a simple script we need to write to configure a smart server, and glue it to the mod_python gateway. Here’s what it looks like:

import modpywsgi
from breezy.transport.http import wsgi

smart_server_app = wsgi.make_app(
    root='/srv/example.com/www/code',
    prefix='/code/',
    path_var='REQUEST_URI',
    readonly=True,
    load_plugins=True,
    enable_logging=True)

def handler(request):
    """Handle a single request."""
    wsgi_server = modpywsgi.WSGIServer(smart_server_app)
    return wsgi_server.run(request)

The modpywsgi module can be found at http://ice.usq.edu.au/svn/ice/trunk/apps/ice-server/modpywsgi.py. It was part of pocoo. You sould make sure you place modpywsgi.py in the same directory as brz-smart.py (ie. /srv/example.com/scripts/).

mod_wsgi

We’ve configured Apache to run the smart server at /srv/example.com/scripts/brz.wsgi. This is just a simple script we need to write to configure a smart server, and glue it to the WSGI gateway. Here’s what it looks like:

from breezy.transport.http import wsgi

def application(environ, start_response):
    app = wsgi.make_app(
        root="/srv/example.com/www/code/",
        prefix="/code",
        readonly=True,
        enable_logging=False)
    return app(environ, start_response)

Clients

Now you can use brz+http:// URLs or just http:// URLs, e.g.:

brz log brz+http://example.com/code/my-branch

Plain HTTP access should continue to work:

brz log http://example.com/code/my-branch

Advanced configuration

Because the Breezy HTTP smart server is a WSGI application, it can be used with any 3rd-party WSGI middleware or server that conforms the WSGI standard. The only requirements are:

  • to construct a SmartWSGIApp, you need to specify a root transport that it will serve.

  • each request’s environ dict must have a ‘breezy.relpath’ variable set.

The make_app helper used in the example constructs a SmartWSGIApp with a transport based on the root path given to it, and calculates the ‘breezy.relpath` for each request based on the prefix and path_var arguments. In the example above, it will take the ‘REQUEST_URI’ (which is set by Apache), strip the ‘/code/’ prefix and the ‘/.brz/smart’ suffix, and set that as the ‘breezy.relpath’, so that a request for ‘/code/foo/bar/.brz/smart’ will result in a ‘breezy.relpath’ of ‘foo/brz’.

It’s possible to configure a smart server for a non-local transport, or that does arbitrary path translations, etc, by constructing a SmartWSGIApp directly. Refer to the docstrings of breezy.transport.http.wsgi and the WSGI standard for further information.

Pushing over the HTTP smart server

It is possible to allow pushing data over the HTTP smart server. The easiest way to do this, is to just supply readonly=False to the wsgi.make_app() call. But be careful, because the smart protocol does not contain any Authentication. So if you enable write support, you will want to restrict access to .brz/smart URLs to restrict who can actually write data on your system, e.g. in apache it looks like:

<Location /code>
    AuthType Basic
    AuthName "example"
    AuthUserFile /srv/example.com/conf/auth.passwd
    <LimitExcept GET>
        Require valid-user
    </LimitExcept>
</Location>

At this time, it is not possible to allow some people to have read-only access and others to have read-write access to the same URLs. Because at the HTTP layer (which is doing the Authenticating), everything is just a POST request. However, it would certainly be possible to have HTTPS require authentication and use a writable server, and plain HTTP allow read-only access.

If brz gives an error like this when accessing your HTTPS site:

brz: ERROR: Connection error: curl connection error (server certificate verification failed.
CAfile:/etc/ssl/certs/ca-certificates.crt CRLfile: none)

You can workaround it by using https+urllib rather than http in your URL, or by uninstalling pycurl. See bug 82086 for more details.