Introduction

valet is a script that turns any directory into a simple wiki, complete with wikitext rendering, editing, and automatically committing changes to version control.

It's a single file with no strict requirements aside from bottle.

News

2015-01-03

I got a bee in my bonnet recently on making some improvements to valet, so Merry Christmas to you all.

New features:

• The /view/X, /edit/X, etc. paths have been removed in favor of using URL query arguments, e.g. X?edit and X?delete. CGI/WSGI path prefixes still work fine.
• New file-management-related functionality, like creating new files and deleting files
• Search! A fancy search field will grep through documents and filenames for your query
• Lots of git-related functionality has been added, including:
  • Displaying a dropdown that lets you view an old version of a file
  • Displaying a table with detailed status about the last few changes to a file
• Lots of code cleanup, refactoring, and simplification
• Fixed a ton of bugs
• Lots of code changes to better comply with pylint (score 9.24)
• Added some basic unit/regression tests in tests.py

2012-10-28

I spent some time hacking on valet this weekend, fixing a few bugs and adding one big new feature: CGI/WSGI support. Now if you link or rename valet to something.cgi or something.fcgi, it will "Do The Right Thing" and operate as a proper webapp. (WSGI support requires flup.)

This feature was required for me to run valet as a lightweight wiki on my DreamHost server without interfering in that environment by opening a new port or leaving a long-running service around. I didn't add a configuration interface; if you're going to be linking or renaming the script, open it up and change the options hard-coded near the top.

Other changes and new features:

• Added a mime query argument to override the automatic filetype detection.
  • You can use this if, for instance, you have a Python script without the ".py" extension; add ?mime=text/x-python to get it properly syntax-colored anyway.
• Added support for arbitrary URL prefixes.
  • This just works automatically; valet will figure out where you put it and prepend that to all of the links instead of hardcoding "/view" etc.
  • This doesn't work super-well with Apache's mod_rewrite; it basically ignores the rewrite headers. This is a limitation of bottle but I'm not sure how to do it better anyway.

Fixes:

• Added proper support for empty "edit" and "post" routes with a slash at the end (now it will complain about no file being provided instead of saying the route doesn't exist)
• Fixed an error output that caused problems when running as a CGI (now writes to stderr)

Usage

$ valet

Or, use some command line options:

$ valet [-d <path>] [-p <port>] [-r] [-s] [-v]

By default, valet serves $CWD; change this with -d <path>. Other options:

• -r: set readonly mode and disable editing
• -s: set simple mode and disable all special-case processing (pygments, wikitext rendering, etc.)
• -v: automatically commit edits into version control if possible
  • Currently only git is supported.

Installation

$ pip install valet

Requirements

• Python 2.6+
• bottle

Tested on:

• Centos 5.4 (python 2.6)
• Debian 6.0.4 (python 2.6)
• Gentoo (python 2.7)
• Mac OS X 10.7 (python 2.7)
• Ubuntu 12.04.1 (python 2.7)
• Windows 7 (python 2.7)

Optional Components

valet supports lots of useful modules, which will be automatically enabled if present:

• python-magic: Better automatic file type detection
• Markdown: Render "markdown" wikitext in files
• python-creole: Render "creole" wikitext in files
• textile: Render "textile" wikitext in files
• docutils: Render "reStructuredText" wikitext in files
• pygments: Adds syntax highlighting for source code files

Use the -s/--simple command-line option to disable these optional components.

Known Issues

• There's no security anywhere here; please, whatever you do, DON'T make this available over the Internet. valet has a readonly mode and attempts to jail reads and edits into its root directory, but be careful!
• bottle's static_file function doesn't appear to handle UTF-8 data properly, or at least it doesn't show up right when I load a file that way.
• The version of python-magic that ships with Ubuntu is broken; I worked around it as best I could.