Setup
Setting up Kallithea
First, you will need to create a Kallithea configuration file. Run the following command to do this:
paster make-config Kallithea my.ini
- This will create the file my.ini in the current directory. This configuration file contains the various settings for Kallithea, e.g proxy port, email settings, usage of static files, cache, Celery settings and logging.
Next, you need to create the databases used by Kallithea. It is recommended to use PostgreSQL or SQLite (default). If you choose a database other than the default ensure you properly adjust the database URL in your my.ini configuration file to use this other database. Kallithea currently supports PostgreSQL, SQLite and MySQL databases. Create the database by running the following command:
paster setup-db my.ini
This will prompt you for a "root" path. This "root" path is the location where Kallithea will store all of its repositories on the current machine. After entering this "root" path setup-db will also prompt you for a username and password for the initial admin account which setup-db sets up for you.
setup process can be fully automated, example for lazy:
paster setup-db my.ini --user=nn --password=secret --email=nn@your.kallithea.server --repos=/srv/repos
- The setup-db command will create all of the needed tables and an admin account. When choosing a root path you can either use a new empty location, or a location which already contains existing repositories. If you choose a location which contains existing repositories Kallithea will add all of the repositories at the chosen location to its database. (Note: make sure you specify the correct path to the root).
- Note: the given path for Mercurial repositories must be write accessible for the application. It's very important since the Kallithea web interface will work without write access, but when trying to do a push it will eventually fail with permission denied errors unless it has write access.
You are now ready to use Kallithea, to run it simply execute:
paster serve my.ini
- This command runs the Kallithea server. The web app should be available at the 127.0.0.1:5000. This ip and port is configurable via the my.ini file created in previous step
- Use the admin account you created above when running setup-db to login to the web app.
- The default permissions on each repository is read, and the owner is admin. Remember to update these if needed.
- In the admin panel you can toggle LDAP, anonymous, permissions settings. As well as edit more advanced options on users and repositories
Optionally users can create rcextensions package that extends Kallithea functionality. To do this simply execute:
paster make-rcext my.ini
This will create rcextensions package in the same place that your ini file lives. With rcextensions it's possible to add additional mapping for whoosh, stats and add additional code into the push/pull/create/delete repo hooks. For example for sending signals to build-bots such as Jenkins. Please see the __init__.py file inside rcextensions package for more details.
Using Kallithea with SSH
Kallithea currently only hosts repositories using http and https. (The addition of ssh hosting is a planned future feature.) However you can easily use ssh in parallel with Kallithea. (Repository access via ssh is a standard "out of the box" feature of Mercurial and you can use this to access any of the repositories that Kallithea is hosting. See PublishingRepositories)
Kallithea repository structures are kept in directories with the same name as the project. When using repository groups, each group is a subdirectory. This allows you to easily use ssh for accessing repositories.
In order to use ssh you need to make sure that your web-server and the users login accounts have the correct permissions set on the appropriate directories. (Note that these permissions are independent of any permissions you have set up using the Kallithea web interface.)
If your main directory (the same as set in Kallithea settings) is for example set to /srv/repos and the repository you are using is named kallithea, then to clone via ssh you should run:
hg clone ssh://user@server.com//srv/repos/kallithea
Using other external tools such as mercurial-server or using ssh key based authentication is fully supported.
Note: In an advanced setup, in order for your ssh access to use the same permissions as set up via the Kallithea web interface, you can create an authentication hook to connect to the Kallithea db and runs check functions for permissions against that.
Setting up Whoosh full text search
The whoosh index can be build by using the paster command make-index. To use make-index you must specify the configuration file that stores the location of the index. You may specify the location of the repositories (--repo-location). If not specified, this value is retrieved from the Kallithea database. It is also possible to specify a comma separated list of repositories (--index-only) to build index only on chooses repositories skipping any other found in repos location
You may optionally pass the option -f to enable a full index rebuild. Without the -f option, indexing will run always in "incremental" mode.
For an incremental index build use:
paster make-index my.ini
For a full index rebuild use:
paster make-index my.ini -f
building index just for chosen repositories is possible with such command:
paster make-index my.ini --index-only=vcs,kallithea
In order to do periodical index builds and keep your index always up to date. It's recommended to do a crontab entry for incremental indexing. An example entry might look like this:
/path/to/python/bin/paster make-index /path/to/kallithea/my.ini
When using incremental mode (the default) whoosh will check the last modification date of each file and add it to be reindexed if a newer file is available. The indexing daemon checks for any removed files and removes them from index.
If you want to rebuild index from scratch, you can use the -f flag as above, or in the admin panel you can check build from scratch flag.
Setting up LDAP support
Kallithea supports LDAP authentication. In order to use LDAP, you have to install the python-ldap package. This package is available via pypi, so you can install it by running
pip install python-ldap
Note
python-ldap requires some certain libs on your system, so before installing it check that you have at least openldap, and sasl libraries.
LDAP settings are located in Admin->LDAP section.
Here's a typical LDAP setup:
Connection settings Enable LDAP = checked Host = host.example.org Port = 389 Account = <account> Password = <password> Connection Security = LDAPS connection Certificate Checks = DEMAND Search settings Base DN = CN=users,DC=host,DC=example,DC=org LDAP Filter = (&(objectClass=user)(!(objectClass=computer))) LDAP Search Scope = SUBTREE Attribute mappings Login Attribute = uid First Name Attribute = firstName Last Name Attribute = lastName E-mail Attribute = mail
If your user groups are placed in a Organisation Unit (OU) structure the Search Settings configuration differs:
Search settings Base DN = DC=host,DC=example,DC=org LDAP Filter = (&(memberOf=CN=your user group,OU=subunit,OU=unit,DC=host,DC=example,DC=org)(objectClass=user)) LDAP Search Scope = SUBTREE
- Enable LDAP : required
- Whether to use LDAP for authenticating users.
- Host : required
- LDAP server hostname or IP address. Can be also a comma separated list of servers to support LDAP fail-over.
- Port : required
- 389 for un-encrypted LDAP, 636 for SSL-encrypted LDAP.
- Account : optional
- Only required if the LDAP server does not allow anonymous browsing of records. This should be a special account for record browsing. This will require LDAP Password below.
- Password : optional
- Only required if the LDAP server does not allow anonymous browsing of records.
- Connection Security : required
Defines the connection to LDAP server
- No encryption
- Plain non encrypted connection
- LDAPS connection
- Enable LDAPS connections. It will likely require Port to be set to a different value (standard LDAPS port is 636). When LDAPS is enabled then Certificate Checks is required.
- START_TLS on LDAP connection
- START TLS connection
- Certificate Checks : optional
How SSL certificates verification is handled - this is only useful when Enable LDAPS is enabled. Only DEMAND or HARD offer full SSL security while the other options are susceptible to man-in-the-middle attacks. SSL certificates can be installed to /etc/openldap/cacerts so that the DEMAND or HARD options can be used with self-signed certificates or certificates that do not have traceable certificates of authority.
- NEVER
- A serve certificate will never be requested or checked.
- ALLOW
- A server certificate is requested. Failure to provide a certificate or providing a bad certificate will not terminate the session.
- TRY
- A server certificate is requested. Failure to provide a certificate does not halt the session; providing a bad certificate halts the session.
- DEMAND
- A server certificate is requested and must be provided and authenticated for the session to proceed.
- HARD
- The same as DEMAND.
- Base DN : required
- The Distinguished Name (DN) where searches for users will be performed. Searches can be controlled by LDAP Filter and LDAP Search Scope.
- LDAP Filter : optional
- A LDAP filter defined by RFC 2254. This is more useful when LDAP Search Scope is set to SUBTREE. The filter is useful for limiting which LDAP objects are identified as representing Users for authentication. The filter is augmented by Login Attribute below. This can commonly be left blank.
- LDAP Search Scope : required
This limits how far LDAP will search for a matching object.
- BASE
- Only allows searching of Base DN and is usually not what you want.
- ONELEVEL
- Searches all entries under Base DN, but not Base DN itself.
- SUBTREE
- Searches all entries below Base DN, but not Base DN itself. When using SUBTREE LDAP Filter is useful to limit object location.
- Login Attribute : required
The LDAP record attribute that will be matched as the USERNAME or ACCOUNT used to connect to Kallithea. This will be added to LDAP Filter for locating the User object. If LDAP Filter is specified as "LDAPFILTER", Login Attribute is specified as "uid" and the user has connected as "jsmith" then the LDAP Filter will be augmented as below
(&(LDAPFILTER)(uid=jsmith))
- First Name Attribute : required
- The LDAP record attribute which represents the user's first name.
- Last Name Attribute : required
- The LDAP record attribute which represents the user's last name.
- Email Attribute : required
- The LDAP record attribute which represents the user's email address.
If all data are entered correctly, and python-ldap is properly installed users should be granted access to Kallithea with LDAP accounts. At this time user information is copied from LDAP into the Kallithea user database. This means that updates of an LDAP user object may not be reflected as a user update in Kallithea.
If You have problems with LDAP access and believe You entered correct information check out the Kallithea logs, any error messages sent from LDAP will be saved there.
Active Directory
Kallithea can use Microsoft Active Directory for user authentication. This is done through an LDAP or LDAPS connection to Active Directory. The following LDAP configuration settings are typical for using Active Directory
Base DN = OU=SBSUsers,OU=Users,OU=MyBusiness,DC=v3sys,DC=local Login Attribute = sAMAccountName First Name Attribute = givenName Last Name Attribute = sn E-mail Attribute = mail
All other LDAP settings will likely be site-specific and should be appropriately configured.
Authentication by container or reverse-proxy
Kallithea supports delegating the authentication of users to its WSGI container, or to a reverse-proxy server through which all clients access the application.
When these authentication methods are enabled in Kallithea, it uses the username that the container/proxy (Apache/Nginx/etc) authenticated and doesn't perform the authentication itself. The authorization, however, is still done by Kallithea according to its settings.
When a user logs in for the first time using these authentication methods, a matching user account is created in Kallithea with default permissions. An administrator can then modify it using Kallithea's admin interface. It's also possible for an administrator to create accounts and configure their permissions before the user logs in for the first time.
Container-based authentication
In a container-based authentication setup, Kallithea reads the user name from the REMOTE_USER server variable provided by the WSGI container.
After setting up your container (see Apache's WSGI config), you'd need to configure it to require authentication on the location configured for Kallithea.
Proxy pass-through authentication
In a proxy pass-through authentication setup, Kallithea reads the user name from the X-Forwarded-User request header, which should be configured to be sent by the reverse-proxy server.
After setting up your proxy solution (see Apache virtual host reverse proxy example, Apache as subdirectory or Nginx virtual host example), you'd need to configure the authentication and add the username in a request header named X-Forwarded-User.
For example, the following config section for Apache sets a subdirectory in a reverse-proxy setup with basic auth:
<Location /<someprefix> > ProxyPass http://127.0.0.1:5000/<someprefix> ProxyPassReverse http://127.0.0.1:5000/<someprefix> SetEnvIf X-Url-Scheme https HTTPS=1 AuthType Basic AuthName "Kallithea authentication" AuthUserFile /srv/kallithea/.htpasswd require valid-user RequestHeader unset X-Forwarded-User RewriteEngine On RewriteCond %{LA-U:REMOTE_USER} (.+) RewriteRule .* - [E=RU:%1] RequestHeader set X-Forwarded-User %{RU}e </Location>
Note
If you enable proxy pass-through authentication, make sure your server is only accessible through the proxy. Otherwise, any client would be able to forge the authentication header and could effectively become authenticated using any account of their liking.
Integration with Issue trackers
Kallithea provides a simple integration with issue trackers. It's possible to define a regular expression that will fetch issue id stored in commit messages and replace that with an url to this issue. To enable this simply uncomment following variables in the ini file:
issue_pat = (?:^#|\s#)(\w+) issue_server_link = https://myissueserver.com/{repo}/issue/{id} issue_prefix = #
issue_pat is the regular expression describing which strings in commit messages will be treated as issue references. A match group in parentheses should be used to specify the actual issue id.
The default expression matches issues in the format '#<number>', e.g. '#300'.
Matched issues are replaced with the link specified as issue_server_link {id} is replaced with issue id, and {repo} with repository name. Since the # is stripped away, issue_prefix is prepended to the link text. issue_prefix doesn't necessarily need to be #: if you set issue prefix to ISSUE- this will generate a URL in format:
<a href="https://myissueserver.com/example_repo/issue/300">ISSUE-300</a>
If needed, more than one pattern can be specified by appending a unique suffix to the variables. For example:
issue_pat_wiki = (?:wiki-)(.+) issue_server_link_wiki = https://mywiki.com/{id} issue_prefix_wiki = WIKI-
With these settings, wiki pages can be referenced as wiki-some-id, and every such reference will be transformed into:
<a href="https://mywiki.com/some-id">WIKI-some-id</a>
Hook management
Hooks can be managed in similar way to this used in .hgrc files. To access hooks setting click advanced setup on Hooks section of Mercurial Settings in Admin.
There are 4 built in hooks that cannot be changed (only enable/disable by checkboxes on previos section). To add another custom hook simply fill in first section with <name>.<hook_type> and the second one with hook path. Example hooks can be found at kallithea.lib.hooks.
Changing default encoding
By default, Kallithea uses UTF-8 encoding. It is configurable as default_encoding in the .ini file. This affects many parts in Kallithea including user names, filenames, and encoding of commit messages. In addition Kallithea can detect if chardet library is installed. If chardet is detected Kallithea will fallback to it when there are encode/decode errors.
Celery configuration
Kallithea can use the distributed task queue system Celery to run tasks like cloning repositories or sending mails.
Kallithea will in most setups work perfectly fine out of the box (without Celery), executing all tasks in the web server process. Some tasks can however take some time to run and it can be better to run such tasks asynchronously in a separate process so the web server can focus on serving web requests.
For installation and configuration of Celery, see the Celery documentation. Note that Celery requires a message broker service like RabbitMQ (recommended) or Redis.
The use of Celery is configured in the Kallithea ini configuration file. To enable it, simply set:
use_celery = true
and add or change the celery.* and broker.* configuration variables.
Remember that the ini files use the format with '.' and not with '_' like Celery. So for example setting BROKER_HOST in Celery means setting broker.host in the configuration file.
To start the Celery process, run:
paster celeryd <configfile.ini>
Note
Make sure you run this command from the same virtualenv, and with the same user that Kallithea runs.
HTTPS support
Kallithea will by default generate URLs based on the WSGI environment.
Alternatively, you can use some special configuration settings to control directly which scheme/protocol Kallithea will use when generating URLs:
- With https_fixup = true, the scheme will be taken from the HTTP_X_URL_SCHEME, HTTP_X_FORWARDED_SCHEME or HTTP_X_FORWARDED_PROTO HTTP header (default 'http').
- With force_https = true the default will be 'https'.
- With use_htsts = true, it will set Strict-Transport-Security when using https.
Nginx virtual host example
Sample config for nginx using proxy:
upstream kallithea { server 127.0.0.1:5000; # add more instances for load balancing #server 127.0.0.1:5001; #server 127.0.0.1:5002; } ## gist alias server { listen 443; server_name gist.myserver.com; access_log /var/log/nginx/gist.access.log; error_log /var/log/nginx/gist.error.log; ssl on; ssl_certificate gist.your.kallithea.server.crt; ssl_certificate_key gist.your.kallithea.server.key; ssl_session_timeout 5m; ssl_protocols SSLv3 TLSv1; ssl_ciphers DHE-RSA-AES256-SHA:DHE-RSA-AES128-SHA:EDH-RSA-DES-CBC3-SHA:AES256-SHA:DES-CBC3-SHA:AES128-SHA:RC4-SHA:RC4-MD5; ssl_prefer_server_ciphers on; rewrite ^/(.+)$ https://your.kallithea.server/_admin/gists/$1; rewrite (.*) https://your.kallithea.server/_admin/gists; } server { listen 443; server_name your.kallithea.server; access_log /var/log/nginx/kallithea.access.log; error_log /var/log/nginx/kallithea.error.log; ssl on; ssl_certificate your.kallithea.server.crt; ssl_certificate_key your.kallithea.server.key; ssl_session_timeout 5m; ssl_protocols SSLv3 TLSv1; ssl_ciphers DHE-RSA-AES256-SHA:DHE-RSA-AES128-SHA:EDH-RSA-DES-CBC3-SHA:AES256-SHA:DES-CBC3-SHA:AES128-SHA:RC4-SHA:RC4-MD5; ssl_prefer_server_ciphers on; ## uncomment root directive if you want to serve static files by nginx ## requires static_files = false in .ini file #root /path/to/installation/kallithea/public; include /etc/nginx/proxy.conf; location / { try_files $uri @kallithea; } location @kallithea { proxy_pass http://kallithea; } }
Here's the proxy.conf. It's tuned so it will not timeout on long pushes or large pushes:
proxy_redirect off; proxy_set_header Host $host; ## needed for container auth #proxy_set_header REMOTE_USER $remote_user; #proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-User $remote_user; proxy_set_header X-Url-Scheme $scheme; proxy_set_header X-Host $http_host; proxy_set_header X-Real-IP $remote_addr; proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-For $proxy_add_x_forwarded_for; proxy_set_header Proxy-host $proxy_host; proxy_buffering off; proxy_connect_timeout 7200; proxy_send_timeout 7200; proxy_read_timeout 7200; proxy_buffers 8 32k; client_max_body_size 1024m; client_body_buffer_size 128k; large_client_header_buffers 8 64k;
Apache virtual host reverse proxy example
Here is a sample configuration file for apache using proxy:
<VirtualHost *:80> ServerName hg.myserver.com ServerAlias hg.myserver.com <Proxy *> Order allow,deny Allow from all </Proxy> #important ! #Directive to properly generate url (clone url) for pylons ProxyPreserveHost On #kallithea instance ProxyPass / http://127.0.0.1:5000/ ProxyPassReverse / http://127.0.0.1:5000/ #to enable https use line below #SetEnvIf X-Url-Scheme https HTTPS=1 </VirtualHost>
Additional tutorial http://pylonsbook.com/en/1.1/deployment.html#using-apache-to-proxy-requests-to-pylons
Apache as subdirectory
Apache subdirectory part:
<Location /<someprefix> > ProxyPass http://127.0.0.1:5000/<someprefix> ProxyPassReverse http://127.0.0.1:5000/<someprefix> SetEnvIf X-Url-Scheme https HTTPS=1 </Location>
Besides the regular apache setup you will need to add the following line into [app:main] section of your .ini file:
filter-with = proxy-prefix
Add the following at the end of the .ini file:
[filter:proxy-prefix] use = egg:PasteDeploy#prefix prefix = /<someprefix>
then change <someprefix> into your chosen prefix
Apache's WSGI config
Alternatively, Kallithea can be set up with Apache under mod_wsgi. For that, you'll need to:
Install mod_wsgi. If using a Debian-based distro, you can install the package libapache2-mod-wsgi:
aptitude install libapache2-mod-wsgi
Enable mod_wsgi:
a2enmod wsgi
Create a wsgi dispatch script, like the one below. Make sure you check the paths correctly point to where you installed Kallithea and its Python Virtual Environment.
Enable the WSGIScriptAlias directive for the wsgi dispatch script, as in the following example. Once again, check the paths are correctly specified.
Here is a sample excerpt from an Apache Virtual Host configuration file:
WSGIDaemonProcess kallithea \ processes=1 threads=4 \ python-path=/srv/kallithea/pyenv/lib/python2.7/site-packages WSGIScriptAlias / /srv/kallithea/dispatch.wsgi WSGIPassAuthorization On
Or if using a dispatcher wsgi script with proper virtualenv activation:
WSGIDaemonProcess kallithea processes=1 threads=4 WSGIScriptAlias / /srv/kallithea/dispatch.wsgi WSGIPassAuthorization On
Note
When running apache as root, please make sure it doesn't run Kallithea as root, for examply by adding: user=www-data group=www-data to the configuration.
Note
If running Kallithea in multiprocess mode, make sure you set instance_id = * in the configuration so each process gets it's own cache invalidationkey.
Example wsgi dispatch script:
import os os.environ["HGENCODING"] = "UTF-8" os.environ['PYTHON_EGG_CACHE'] = '/srv/kallithea/.egg-cache' # sometimes it's needed to set the curent dir os.chdir('/srv/kallithea/') import site site.addsitedir("/srv/kallithea/pyenv/lib/python2.7/site-packages") from paste.deploy import loadapp from paste.script.util.logging_config import fileConfig fileConfig('/srv/kallithea/my.ini') application = loadapp('config:/srv/kallithea/my.ini')
Or using proper virtualenv activation:
activate_this = '/srv/kallithea/venv/bin/activate_this.py' execfile(activate_this,dict(__file__=activate_this)) import os os.environ['HOME'] = '/srv/kallithea' ini = '/srv/kallithea/kallithea.ini' from paste.script.util.logging_config import fileConfig fileConfig(ini) from paste.deploy import loadapp application = loadapp('config:' + ini)
Other configuration files
Some example init.d scripts can be found in init.d directory: https://kallithea-scm.org/repos/kallithea/files/tip/init.d/