Using MoinMoin with Twisted

Twisted is a standalone python framework for many kinds of applications. For MoinMoin, we use Twisted as a python web server that just imports MoinMoin persistently.

This has the advantage that the Python interpreter and all Python scripts (including Twisted itself and also MoinMoin) is only loaded and initialized one time, and that data can be cached in memory from request to request, enhancing the performance of MoinMoin.

Another advantage is that this is all based on Python.

First do ../BasicInstallation and ../WikiInstanceCreation.

Install Twisted

First, install Twisted (see URL above). Many Linux distributions have Twisted packages. Please refer to the documentation of Twisted for installation information.

Configuring the Twisted server

Copy the file wiki/server/mointwisted.py to your wiki directory. Edit and adapt the settings to your needs.

System path configuration

If you did a standard install, and you are not a developer, you probably want to skip this section. Otherwise, you might want to add the path to moin and config file, like that:

sys.path.insert(0, '/path/to/moin')
sys.path.insert(0, '/path/to/wikiconfig')

Config class options

If you did a standard install, the default options might be just what you need. Check and change what you like:

Option	Default	Comment
docs	'/usr/share/moin/wiki/htdocs'	Path to moin shared files
user	'www-data'	If you run as root, the server will run as this user
group	'www-data'	If you run as root, the server will run as this group
port	8080	Port to serve. To serve a privileged port below 1024 you will have to run as root
interfaces	`['']`	A list of interfaces the server will listen to. If the list contains the entry `''` (like for the default configuration), all other entries are ignored and the server will listen to all interfaces.
logPath	'mointwisted.log'	Log file.
profiler	commented python code	Useful only if you are a moin developer.

Configuring wikiconfig.py

The sample config file should be just fine.

Option	Default	Comment
url_prefix	'/wiki'	You should not change this, or images and css file will not be available to the wiki!

Starting the server on Unix

On GNU/Linux, Mac OS X or another POSIX-like OS, copy wiki/server/mointwisted to your wiki directory. You might want to adapt PYTHONPATH and the path to twistd.

Start the server with ./mointwisted start and test your wiki at http://localhost:8080/. Stop the server with ./mointwisted stop.

Starting the server on Windows

Copy wiki/server/mointwisted.cmd to your wiki directory. You might have to change the path pointing to the python-scripts directory.

Double click mointwisted.cmd to start the server. It will create a new terminal window. To stop the server, close the terminal window.