[OH-Dev] Status of the wiki: needs work, fixes forthcoming in a couple of weeks

[Asheesh Laroia]

Here are some problems with the wiki:

- Visiting https://openhatch.org/wiki/ shows no styling.

- Making a request to that URL causes Heroku to proxy the request to
wiki.openhatch.org/wiki/

- The reason the styling doesn't work is that /wiki/MediaWiki:Monobook.css
includes some CSS that the wiki can't seem to load, seemingly due to the
Heroku proxying.

- Trying to log into the wiki results in (for me) a problem where the wiki
attempts to log you in, but then silently does not

- The wiki uses the Django session tables, but wants to query them via
MySQL but our database now uses Postgres

- wiki.openhatch.org has no HTTPS for now

Given that, here is my plan for the next time I have time to look into the
wiki:

- Adjust AuthDjango to be able to use Postgres

- Decide henceforth the wiki will live on a separate hostname from the main
Heroku-based web app, since having the two services on the same hostname is
messy -- I declare that to be wiki.openhatch.org

- Adjust the oh-mainline code to redirect, not proxy (see mysite/urls.py),
to wiki.openhatch.org (and if the new hostname works, adjust that to be a
permanent redirect)

- Adjust the wiki to use wiki.openhatch.org/wiki/ as its base URL

- I asked Let's Encrypt if we can add wiki.openhatch.org to the Let's
Encrypt private beta, but we can use CloudFlare for HTTPS instead if not.

- This will require me setting the Django session cookie stuff on *.
openhatch.org (in cookie terms .openhatch.org), which does mean any
subdomain could use the session cookie, including the Discourse forum and
RailsBridge-based BridgeTroll software. I think I can live with that attack
surface but I wanted to just say it somewhere.


Other notes:

- The wiki runs as user ID www-data and its files live in
/home/wiki/www/wiki on host linode.openhatch.org

- It'd be cool to automatically upgrade the wiki etc., but that's
lower-priority than making sure it works well enough.

- I'll probably have time to do the above in the next couple of weeks.

- If other people want to do the above instead of me, and/or want to help
with the above, I'm enthusiastic to schedule time to help you succeed.
Else, I'm fine with doing it.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.openhatch.org/pipermail/devel/attachments/20151202/f0ed49b3/attachment.html>