HelpContents > HelpOnAdministration > HelpOnConfiguration

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1. Configuration of MoinMoin
1. Overview of configuration options
2. Changing character sets
3. File attachments

1. Configuration of MoinMoin

MoinMoin is configured by changing the moin_config.py file, which normally sits besides your moin.cgi driver script. moin_config.py is imported by the MoinMoin main code early in a request cycle and is found because the current directory (i.e. that of moin.cgi) is part of the Python system path. Consequently, moin_config.py can sit anywhere in your PYTHONPATH.

1.1. Overview of configuration options

The following table contains default values and a short description for all configuration variables. Most of these can be left at their defaults, those you need to change with every installation are listed in the sample moin_config.py that comes with the distribution.

1.2. Changing character sets

If you want to use MoinMoin with a character set other than Latin-1, you might or even have to change the default character sets for WikiNames in "moin_config.py". A safe default is US-ASCII, i.e.

upperletters = "A-Z"
lowerletters = "0-9a-z"

With that setting, you need to set "allow_extended_names=1" and use the special markup for extended WikiNames ["extended name"] to get any names with characters outside the core latin alphabet.

1.3. File attachments

The AttachFile action lets a page have multiple attached files. Since file uploads could be abused for DoS (Denial of Service) attacks, AttachFile is an action that has to be enabled by the wiki administrator. To do this, add "allowed_actions = ['AttachFile']" to your configuration file.

There are also two storage/retrieval models for file attachments:

1. attachments are stored "privately" and can only be retrieved via a CGI GET (via URLs like http://wiki.net/moin/SomePage?action=AttachFile&do=get&target=filename.ext).

2. attachments are stored into a directory directly accessible by the web server, and can thus be served directly by the webserver, without any invocation of MoinMoin (leading to URLs like http://wiki.net/wiki/mywiki/SomePage/attachments/filename.ext).

Generally, the second option is preferable¹, but it also requires additional configuration steps, and possibly more rights on the host machine. Because of that, the first option is the default; attachments are stored in the "data" directory, with paths like "<data>/pages/<pagename>/attachments/<filename>".

For the second option, you need to add an attachments option to your configuration, which is a dictionary of two values:

attachments = {
    'dir': 'C:/Moin/share/moin/htdocs/mywiki',
    'url': '/wiki/mywiki',
}

dir is the file system path to the attachment storage, and url is the matching URI to get access to that directory. That directory has to exist and be writable for the webserver, so it can create the necessary directories and files for new attachments. Note that you have to manually create this directory, MoinMoin will not create it for you.

The above example shows a typical configuration for Windows that works for an installation according to the default setup procedure (see ?HelpOnInstalling/ApacheOnWin32). For UNIX, if you followed ?HelpOnInstalling/ApacheOnUnix, the necessary configuration will look like this:

attachments = {
    'dir': '/usr/local/share/moin/htdocs/mywiki',
    'url': '/wiki/mywiki',
}

After you have completed the configuration changes, try to create an attachment for WikiSandBox to check for any errors. If you have any permission problems, you will likely see a Python traceback or some error message.