Move mediagoblin dbs out of user_dev for race condition directory-creation reasons.

[mediagoblin.git] / docs / source / configuration.rst

.. MediaGoblin Documentation

   Written in 2011, 2012 by MediaGoblin contributors

   To the extent possible under law, the author(s) have dedicated all
   copyright and related and neighboring rights to this software to
   the public domain worldwide. This software is distributed without
   any warranty.

   You should have received a copy of the CC0 Public Domain
   Dedication along with this software. If not, see
   <http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/>.

.. _configuration-chapter:

========================
Configuring MediaGoblin
========================

So!  You've got MediaGoblin up and running, but you need to adjust
some configuration parameters.  Well you've come to the right place!


MediaGoblin's config files
==========================

When configuring MediaGoblin, there are two files you might want to
make local modified versions of, and one extra file that might be
helpful to look at.  Let's examine these.

mediagoblin.ini
  This is the config file for MediaGoblin, the application.  If you want to
  tweak settings for MediaGoblin, you'll usually tweak them here.

paste.ini
  This is primarily a server configuration file, on the Python side
  (specifically, on the WSGI side, via `paste deploy
  <http://pythonpaste.org/deploy/>`_ / `paste script
  <http://pythonpaste.org/script/>`_).  It also sets up some
  middleware that you can mostly ignore, except to configure
  sessions... more on that later.  If you are adding a different
  Python server other than fastcgi / plain HTTP, you might configure
  it here.  You probably won't need to change this file very much.


There's one more file that you certainly won't change unless you're
making coding contributions to mediagoblin, but which can be useful to
read and reference:

mediagoblin/config_spec.ini
  This file is actually a specification for mediagoblin.ini itself, as
  a config file!  It defines types and defaults.  Sometimes it's a
  good place to look for documentation... or to find that hidden
  option that we didn't tell you about. :)


Making local copies
===================

Let's assume you're doing the virtualenv setup described elsewhere in this
manual, and you need to make local tweaks to the config files. How do you do 
that? Let's see.

To make changes to mediagoblin.ini ::

    cp mediagoblin.ini mediagoblin_local.ini

To make changes to paste.ini ::

    cp paste.ini paste_local.ini

From here you should be able to make direct adjustments to the files,
and most of the commands described elsewhere in this manual will "notice"
your local config files and use those instead of the non-local version.

.. note::

   Note that all commands provide a way to pass in a specific config
   file also, usually by a ``-cf`` flag.


Common changes
==============

Enabling email notifications
----------------------------

You'll almost certainly want to enable sending email.  By default,
MediaGoblin doesn't really do this... for the sake of developer
convenience, it runs in "email debug mode".

To make MediaGoblin send email, you need a mailer daemon.

Change this in your ``mediagoblin.ini`` file::

    email_debug_mode = false

You should also change the "from" email address by setting
``email_sender_address``. For example::

    email_sender_address = "foo@example.com"

If you have more custom SMTP settings, you also have the following
options at your disposal, which are all optional, and do exactly what
they sound like.

- email_smtp_host
- email_smtp_port
- email_smtp_user
- email_smtp_pass


All other configuration changes
-------------------------------

To be perfectly honest, there are quite a few options and we haven't had
time to document them all.

So here's a cop-out section saying that if you get into trouble, hop
onto IRC and we'll help you out::

    #mediagoblin on irc.freenode.net


Celery
======

We should point to another celery-specific section of the document
actually :)