Sharing page

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This page is intended to display content dynamically based on login information.
Think of it as an AllMyLinks page with the option to show only what you want to certain people.

For my needs, it was esier to hardcode user information into the script so the project isn't suited for large audiences.

How it works

The page the user sees is the output of a Python script.

The script itself is devided in three separate parts:

• The "Users" part is a list of users associated with the groups they have access to
• The "Content" part is a list of links associated with the groups that can see them
• The main part that reads the username from an environment variable, gets their groups from the first ârt and fetches authorized content from the second part.

Since the scale of my project is very small, I decided to hardcode users and content into Python lists rather than work with text files.

Installation guide

This is intended for Debian

The process might be slightly different with other flavours.

Script configuration

Copy all the files to /var/www/html/sharing.

Make all the *.py files executeable by Apache.

Default users

There are two default users and one default group:

• Content associated with the "everyone" group is seen by all users regardless of their appartenance
• "None" is used when a user isn't authenticated. He has access to the "everyone" group
• "admin" has access to all content.

Open the User file and add users to the list in the following fashion:

"username": ["group1", "group2", "group3"],

In the Content file, associate content with groups:

["Name of content", "URL to content", ["group1", "group2"], False, "wallpaper.jpg"],

Apache configuration

First, create a new directory in /var/www/html. Let's name it sharing.
Next, paste all the files there and make all the *.py files executeable.

Create users that will have access to the page. First, create the files /etc/apache2/passwd/passwd and /etc/apache2/passwd/groups. Next, add users and their passwords using

htpasswd /etc/apache2/passwd/passwd username

Then open the groups file and add the users to the group sharing as follows:

sharing: user1 user2 user3

You need to configure Apache so it would run Python. The following is to be added into the Apache2 configuration file. Make sure to customize folder names and anything else you might change. The following changes are:

• Allow Apache to run Python scripts
• Set the index to index.py
• Require authentication to access the directory
  • Users must be part of the "sharing" group

/etc/apache2/Apache2.conf

<Directory /var/www/html/sharing/>
    Options Indexes FollowSymLinks ExecCGI
    AddHandler cgi-script /py .cgi
    LoadModule cgi_module /usr/lib/apache2/modules/mod_cgi.so
    AllowOverride None
    Require all granted
    DirectoryIndex index.py
    AuthType Basic
    AuthName "Restricted content'
    AuthUserFile "/etc/apache2/passwd/passwd"
    AuthGroupFile "/etc/apache2/passwd/groups"
    Require group sharing
</Directory>

Restart Apache for changes to take effect.