Installation

Note

This installation guide covers HyperKitty, the web user interface to access GNU Mailman v3 Archives. To install GNU Mailman follow the instructions in the documentation: http://packages.python.org/mailman/

Install the code

Install the HyperKitty package and its dependencies with the following commands:

sudo pip install -r requirements.txt
sudo python setup.py install

Setup your django project

You now have installed the necessary packages but you still need to setup the Django site (project).

First, get the project directory from the source code management system:

git clone https://github.com/hyperkitty/hyperkitty_standalone.git

Second, change the database setting in hyperkitty_standalone/settings.py to your preferred database. HyperKitty uses two databases, one to store the metadata and other to store the emails. Edit this file to reflect the correct database credentials. The configuration variables are DATABASES (at the top of the file) and KITTYSTORE_URL (at the bottom).

Or better yet, instead of changing the settings.py file itself, copy the values you want to change to a file called settings_local.py and change them there. It will override the values in settings.py and will make future upgrades easier.

Note

Detailed information on how to use different database engines can be found in the Django documentation.

Setting up the databases

There are two databases in HyperKitty: one for the Django app, configured in the regular DATABASES variable, and one for the KittyStore backend, configured in the KITTYSTORE_URL variable.

Now you can create the KittyStore and HyperKitty databases, and set their access URLs in hyperkitty_standalone/settings.py (or hyperkitty_standalone/settings_local.py). HyperKitty’s database can be created using the following command:

django-admin syncdb  --pythonpath hyperkitty_standalone --settings settings
django-admin migrate --pythonpath hyperkitty_standalone --settings settings

KittyStore’s database is configured using an URI. The syntax is as follows:

KITTYSTORE_URL = "scheme://username:password@hostname:port/database_name"

The scheme may be “sqlite”, “postgres”, or “mysql”. For example, with sqlite:

KITTYSTORE_URL = "sqlite:////path/to/hyperkitty/directory/kittystore.db'

Note

If you’re using SQLite and you’re getting “Database is locked” errors, stop your webserver during the import.

KittyStore also uses a fulltext search engine which resides in a directory on the filesystem. The path to this directory must be configured in the KITTYSTORE_SEARCH_INDEX variable. This directory should be writable by the user running Mailman and readable by the user running HyperKitty (usually your webserver). It will be automatically created when the regular KittyStore database is created. The command to create the KittyStore database is:

kittystore-updatedb -p hyperkitty_standalone -s settings

Importing the current archives

If you are currently running Mailman 2.1, you can run kittystore-import to import existing archives into the mailman database. This command will import the Mbox files: if you’re installing hyperkitty on the machine which hosted the previous version of mailman, those files are available locally and you can use them directly.

The command’s syntax is:

kittystore-import --settings MODULE --pythonpath PATH -l NAME mbox_file [mbox_file ...]

where:

  • MODULE is the python module with HyperKitty’s Django settings,
  • PATH is an additionnal path to add to Python if the settings module can’t be imported directly (this should be familiar if you know how to use Django’s django-admin command)
  • NAME is the fully-qualified list name (including the @ sign and the domain name)
  • The mbox_file arguments are the existing archives to import. Make sure you point

at the *.txt version of the files and not the *.gz.

If the previous archives aren’t available locally, you need to download them from your current Mailman 2.1 installation. The kittystore-download21 command can help you do that, its syntax is:

kittystore-download21 -u URL -l LIST_NAME [-d destdir]

where:

  • URL is the base URL of your current Mailman 2.1 installation, typically the part before the /pipermail subdirectory when you’re looking at your current archives. Make sure you remember to include the ‘http://‘ in this string.
  • LIST_NAME is the name of the mailing-list without the domain (before the @ sign)

Running HyperKitty on Apache with mod_wsgi

Note

This guide assumes that you know how to setup a VirtualHost with Apache. If you are using SQLite, the .db file as well as its folder need to be writable by the web server.

Edit hyperkitty_standalone/hyperkitty.apache.conf to point to your source code location.

Add following line to your apache/httpd configuration file:

Include "/{path-to-hyperkitty_standalone}/hyperkitty.apache.conf"

And reload Apache. We’re almost ready. But you need to collect the static files from HyperKitty (which resides somewhere on your pythonpath) to be able to serve them from the site directory. All you have to do is run:

django-admin collectstatic --pythonpath hyperkitty_standalone --settings settings
django-admin assets --pythonpath hyperkitty_standalone --settings settings build --parse-templates

Note

Your django-admin command may be called django-admin.py depending on your installation method.

These static files will be collected in the hyperkitty_standalone/static directory and served by Apache. You should now be all set. Try accessing HyperKitty in your web browser.

Connecting to Mailman

To receive incoming emails from Mailman, you must add the follwing lines to mailman.cfg:

[archiver.hyperkitty]
class: hyperkitty.archiver.Archiver
enable: yes
configuration: /path/to/hyperkitty_standalone/settings.py

Warning

The user that Mailman runs under (unually “mailman”) must be able to read both the settings.py and settings_local.py files. Remember that those files also contain the database passwords, so make sure the permissions are correct. We suggest adding the mailman user to the apache group, and only giving this group read access to those files.

After having made these changes, you must restart Mailman. Check its log files to make sure the emails are correctly archived. You should not see “Broken archiver: hyperkitty” messages.

Initial setup

After installing HyperKitty for the first time, you can populate the database with some data that may be useful, for example a set of thread categories to assign to your mailing-list threads. This can be done by running the following command:

django-admin loaddata --pythonpath hyperkitty_standalone --settings settings first_start

Thread categories can be edited and added from the Django administration interface (append /admin to your base URL).

Upgrading

To upgrade an existing installation of HyperKitty, you need to update the code base and run the commands that will update the database schemas. Before updating any of those databases, it is recommanded to shut down the webserver which serves HyperKitty (Apache HTTPd for example).

There are two main databases in HyperKitty. The one from KittyStore and the one from HyperKitty itself. To update the KittyStore database, just run:

kittystore-updatedb -p hyperkitty_standalone -s settings

This command may take a long time to complete, don’t interrupt it.

Then, to update the HyperKitty database, run:

django-admin syncdb  --pythonpath hyperkitty_standalone --settings settings
django-admin migrate --pythonpath hyperkitty_standalone --settings settings

After those commands complete, your database will be updated, you can start your webserver again, and restart Mailman (to take the KittyStore upgrade into account).

Maintenance

HyperKitty imports some properties from Mailman, like the list description, its privacy status, etc. This import is done and refreshed on each message arrival. If you change some properties in Mailman and you want to manually refresh them in HyperKitty, you can run the following command:

kittystore-sync-mailman -p {path-to-hyperkitty_standalone} -s settings

This command will refresh list properties and user IDs, and may take several minutes to complete.

License

HyperKitty is licensed under the GPL v3.0