[Owncloud] urlrouting

Wed Mar 14 19:17:06 UTC 2012

On 03/14/2012 01:49 PM, Frank Karlitschek wrote:
> On 14.03.2012, at 01:46, Roland van Laar<roland at micite.net>  wrote:
>
>> Hello,
>>
> Hi Roland,
>
> thank you for your contribution.
It's nice to be thanked.

>> I added a url routing feature to owncloud.
>> For now only the root index and the files/index.php work.
>> lib/setup.php is also patched to setup a correct .htaccess when it's deployed behind Apache.
> How does it work if ownCloud is running on a webserver other than apache or if rewrite support is not installed or the user is not allowed to configure rewrites in .htaccess or can´t use .htaccess files at all?
First, for now it doesn't work when rewriting isn't enabled. (I didn't 
make a merge request because it's not merge ready).

And secondly, owncloud shouldn't work when rewrites and/or .htaccess 
files (or equivalent) aren't possible.
See my earlier mails about security[1][2] and klaas' response [3]
and my merge-request[4] which aims to fix this for .htaccess files and 
Apache.

> One of the main design goal of ownCloud is that is should run on as many servers as possible without problems and don´t require manual configuration from the user.

That's a good and noble goal, although the 'run everywhere' matra 
shouldn't come before basic security
because private files that are accessible for the whole world is a bit 
of a problem.
>
>> One of the reasons to add urlrouting is to allow for cleaner urls in owncloud.
>> It's now possible to remove the .php ending for example.
>> Another reason is increased security because with urlrouting only files
>> included in the url patterns are called from apache.
>> The other files, such as 3rd party libraries are now only accessible via code.
> I don´t really see the benefit for ownCloud here. ownCloud is a personal space for files and data and not a public website. So we don´t need to care about SEO urls or Google or how convenient it is to remember, tweet or mail urls. I agree that shorter urls without .php are prettier from an esthetics standpoint but this benefit is not strong enough to justify to make ownCloud incompatible with a lot of our users.
I don't care about SEO and Google either since it's not useful for 
owncloud installations.
I do care about nice urls and security, although in this case mainly 
security.

One of the options about not having .php is the ability to be able to 
rewrite the code in another language or framework
and still have everything work.

It also opens up a lot of possibilities for owncloud code wise because 
files and urls aren't linked 1 on 1.

>> A dispatch.php is added which becomes the starting point for all non img,ajax, css and js requests.
>> dispatch.php contains the starting point for urls.
>>
>> An example url patterns:
>> $urlPatterns = Array(
>>     Array('url' =>  '^/$', 'file' =>  'index.php'),
>>     Array('url' =>  '^/index.php$', 'file' =>  'index.php'),
>>     Array('url' =>  '^/files', 'dir_include' =>  'files/'),
>> );
>>
>> It's possible to include urls.php files in other directories via the
>> 'dir_include' =>  dir_name syntax in the Array.
>>
>> The code: https://gitorious.org/~rvanlaar/owncloud/rvanlaars-owncloud-urlrouting
>>
>> What do you think?
>> Is this something that has the potential to be included in owncloud?
>
> I´m really sorry to say but I think that your proposal is not suitable for ownCloud at the moment.
> I hate to say this to a new contributor but I hope you understand the reason.

I do understand it. One of the reasons I published the code now is to 
get feedback.
In the ideal case the dispatch code would be a class OC_route in lib.
That  way the code would be cleaner and tie in with the OwnClouds class 
loader.

How can this code become suitable for OwnCloud?
And is urlrouting something that could be incorporated in OwnCloud?
>
> I suggest to post to this mailing-list earlier next time if you propose big architectural changes so that we can discuss this before you spend a lot of time coding. :-)

I'm a bit surprised about you saying this. I did communicate about this 
idea [5][6].
I also got some advice about it [7].
There is even a bug report about it.[8]

However, I wanted to write code that works, instead of talk a lot about it.
An idea with code is better than an idea without, and I wanted to have a 
proof
of concept.

> There are a lot of areas in ownCloud where we need help.
>
> If you need some inspiration you can have a look at:
> http://owncloud.org/dev/junior-jobs/  or
> http://bugs.owncloud.org/

Well I worked on bug 135 ;-).

>
> It would be awesome if you would help us to improve ownCloud in other areas and become a contributor.

OwnCloud is an interesting project that I would like  to see become more 
and more useful.
I already contributed some code and documentation :-).
And I would like to contribute more.

However I would like to see (a bit) more action by the current 
maintainer/committers.
I made a merge request [4] and there hasn't been any action on it.
I also wrote and email about security [2] for the installation page [9]
because the default install on ubuntu is wide open and I haven't seen 
that being picked up.

>
> Thanks a lot :-)

Thank you for your time, your reply and your positive words.

Regards,

Roland
>
> Cheers
> Frank

[1] https://mail.kde.org/pipermail/owncloud/2012-February/002261.html
[2] https://mail.kde.org/pipermail/owncloud/2012-February/002406.html
[3] https://mail.kde.org/pipermail/owncloud/2012-February/002414.html
[4] https://gitorious.org/owncloud/owncloud/merge_requests/93
[5] https://mail.kde.org/pipermail/owncloud/2012-March/002494.html
[6] https://mail.kde.org/pipermail/owncloud/2012-March/002515.html
[7] https://mail.kde.org/pipermail/owncloud/2012-March/002527.html
[8] http://bugs.owncloud.org/thebuggenie/owncloud/issues/oc-135
[9] http://owncloud.org/support/setup-and-installation/linux-server/