Item13081: Enhancements to tools/configure shell tool

Ideas for improvements to the command line configure tool tools/configure

Set configure / sudo password

I'm making a pass at this. It probably needs some rework. The checkin prompts for a password during the initial -save "bootstrap" process. It checks if Crypt::PasswdMD5 is available. If it's there, it prompts for a password, hashes it, and adds it to the configuration. The gui help text was not particularly useful, since the web interface cannot encode a password, so I've also added a way to override the default help text for the prompt.

The web bootstrap leaves the initial user logged in as admin, so that registration, and updates to AdminGroup or further updates to the configuration can be done. However building a configuration from the shell, no user is logged in, and a password needs to be available for further configuration.

Other possibilities:

• Add an explicit -password action that accepts and encodes a password
• Add the encoding into the Password field type instead of executing it in the UI. That might allow the web to set a password as well.

Other possible enhancements

• Add an -init option. Similar to -save but without any prompting. I'm wondering here how an unattended script might use the tool to initialize a configuration without prompting.

configure -save -init
configure -save -set {DefaultUrlHost} 'http://...'
configure -save -set ...

• Also wondering if Foswiki::Configure::Load::bootstrapConfig could/should be refactored a bit more to detect a shell environment and skip all the URL related settings. Then tools/configure could call it to guess all the file system paths.

• And add an -expert mode? (Reduce prompts to simple {key} (default): prompts without all the help text.

-- GeorgeClark - 08 Nov 2014

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