Configuration

The module config provided by the ViUR server contains several configuration options which change the servers behavior, allowing you to access system-global parameters, or provide some kind of global variables within a ViUR project setup. It simply can be imported into any server-side module with

from server.config import conf

All ViUR-specific parameters have the prefix viur.. Parameters that influence or extend information used by the Admin-tools start with the prefix admin. or more specialized with admin.vi.. If parameters are changed for configuration issues, this should be done on the server’s main entry (i.e. that Python source file that calls viur.core.run()).

This section gives an overview and detailed information about how to use ViURs pre-defined configuration parameters.

Server configuration

viur.accessRights

Defines a list of default user access rights. Defaults to ["admin", "root"].

This list can be extended to project-specific access rights that are made available to every user entity created by the user module. By default, there exists two entries which are

  • admin defines if the user has admin-access (ie. is allowed to access the admin and vi render)

  • root defines if the user is a super-admin (users having the root-flag are allowed to do anything by default)

These entries can be enriched in the application’s main entry with

conf["viur.accessRights"].append("myProjectFlag")

Each module in your application will register the flags it supports during startup, so make sure you use .append to add your flags instead of (re)-setting this property

viur.availableLanguages

Defines a list of valid language-codes. These are the languages that are available on projects with multi-language setup. Unless it’s white-listed here, ViUR will refuse to serve requests in that language. The language code also defines the name of the language translation file in the translations folder of the project.

Example configuration:

conf["viur.availableLanguages"] = ["de", "en", "fr"] # German, English, French.

See also viur.defaultLanguage, viur.domainLanguageMapping, viur.languageMethod and viur.logMissingTranslations.

Hint

If translation is not working despite having viur.availableLanguages set, check that your projects-tranlation module is importable and contains an translation table for that language. If your translation-module is not importable, all i18n features are disabled!

viur.cacheEnvironmentKey

Call this function for each time we need to derive a key for caching.

If the configuration parameter viur.cacheEnvironmentKey contains a callable, this function will be called for each cache-attempt and the result will be included in the computed cache-key. This allows you to easily include environment variables like the current language into the key used to determine the caching-slot.

viur.capabilities

Reserved for further use.

Can be used to advertise system-wide addons to modules.

viur.contentSecurityPolicy

Emit Content-Security-Policy HTTP-header with each request.

Use viur.core.securityheaders.addCspRule() to modify this property.

viur.db.caching

Defines a caching strategy that is used by the database API to reduce read-requests on cloud-databases like Google Datastore. We recommend to leave this set to 2. See Data consistency.

  • 2: Aggressive mode (default)

  • 1: Safe mode

  • 0: Turns optimization off

viur.debug.traceExceptions

Disable catch and handling of user-generated http-exceptions. Useful to trace where a Redirect or Forbidden etc. error is raised inside deeply nested code.

viur.debug.traceExternalCallRouting

Logging calls of any functions marked as exposed. It will write the called function name and it’s parameter to the log.

Warning

This might include sensitive data like unencrypted usernames and passwords in your log! Keep it off in production!

viur.debug.traceInternalCallRouting

Logging calls of any functions marked as internalExposed. It will write the called function name and it’s parameter to the log.

Warning

This might include sensitive data like unencrypted usernames and passwords in your log! Keep it off in production!

viur.debug.traceQueries

Logging of datastore queries.

If enabled, ViUR will write each query run against the datastore into the log - including it’s kind, filters and orders.

viur.defaultLanguage

Default language used by the project, if no other language code was specified.

Unless overridden, english (“en”) will be used as the default language.

See also viur.availableLanguages, viur.domainLanguageMapping, viur.languageMethod and viur.logMissingTranslations.

viur.disableCache

If set True, the decorator @enableCache from server.cache has no effect. Caching inside the jinja2 Render will also be disabled.

Note

This doesn’t cause entries already in the cache to be evicted. If they’re old entries they just won’t be used and no new entries will be added. Once that property is set to false again, old entries in the cache will be served again if they haven’t expired yet.

viur.domainLanguageMapping

Map domains to alternative default languages.

See also viur.availableLanguages, viur.defaultLanguage, viur.languageMethod and viur.logMissingTranslations.

viur.emailRecipientOverride

Override recipients for all outgoing email. This should be done for testing purposes only.

If set, all outgoing emails will be send to this address (always overriding the dests-parameter in `viur.core.utils.sendEmail`_).

conf["viur.emailRecipientOverride"] = "john@doe.net" # Simple override
conf["viur.emailRecipientOverride"] = ["john@doe.net", "max@mustermann.de"] # Override to multiple targets
conf["viur.emailRecipientOverride"] = "@viur.dev" # Redirect all emails to this domain. "me@gmail.com" would become "me_at_gmail_dot_com@viur.is"
conf["viur.emailRecipientOverride"] = False # Entirely disable sending emails.
conf["viur.emailRecipientOverride"] = None # Default, outgoing email go to the specified recipients.

See also viur.emailSenderOverride.

viur.emailSenderOverride

Override the sender of all outgoing emails by this one.

If set, this sender will be used, regardless of what the templates advertise as sender.

conf["viur.emailSenderOverride"] = "john@doe.net" # Simple override
conf["viur.emailSenderOverride"] = "John Doe <john@doe.net>" # Override with name
conf["viur.emailSenderOverride"] = None # No override (default)

See also viur.emailRecipientOverride.

viur.errorHandler

Defines a custom error handler. If set, ViUR calls this function instead of rendering the viur.errorTemplate in case of exception.

The function must accept one argument (an instance of the Python exception object (possibly an instance of `viur.core.errors.HTTPException`_), in case that an HTTP-exception occurs).

viur.errorTemplate

Defines a custom error template. This is a path to the template to render if an unhandled error occurs.

This is a Python String-template, not a Jinja2 one! Might have no effect if viur.errorHandler is set.

viur.forceSSL

Enable HTTPS enforcement.

config["viur.forceSSL"] = True # We want to be secure!

If set True, all requests must be encrypted (ignored on development server). If unencrypted requests are received, a redirect to https://your.domain/ is raised (the path and request paremeters are not preserved for security reasons).

viur.languageAliasMap

Defines a mapping for certain languages directing to one translation (ie. us->en).

viur.languageMethod

Method of how translation is applied. By default, this is configured to “session”.

  • session saves within session (default)

  • url injects a language prefix into the URL

  • domain configures one domain per language

viur.logMissingTranslations

Silently log missing translations during application run. If ViUR encounters an missing translation, it logs it by creating an entry in the viur-missing-translations kind.

viur.mainApp

Holds a reference to the pre-build application-instance that’s created by viur.core.run(). May not be overridden, reassigned or modified!

viur.maxPasswordLength

Defines a maximum password length. This prevents denial of service attacks through large inputs for pbkdf2. The value defaults to 512.

viur.maxPostParamsCount

Upper limit of the amount of parameters accepted per request. Prevents Hash-Collision-Attacks. The value defaults to 250.

viur.models

Holds a dictionary of all models. May not be overridden, reassigned or modified!

viur.noSSLCheckUrls

Disable the viur.forceSSL restriction for certain URLs (ie these URLs will be also accessible and served over unencrypted http). Add an asterisk to whitelist an entire prefix (exact match otherwise).

It defaults to ["/_tasks*", "/ah/*"] as the task-queue doesn’t call using https.

viur.requestPreprocessor

Attach a request preprocessor to the application.

A preprocesser is a function receiving the original path from the URL requested and might rewrite it before its used by ViUR to determine which function in the application should be called. Can also be used to run custom code on each request before it’s normally dispatched to your application.

viur.salt

Default salt used for passwords.

Deprecated since version 0.8: Don’t change. Will be removed in a future version. Salts are now randomly chosen for each password and stored along with the hash inside the datastore.

viur.searchValidChars

Characters valid for the internal search functionality (all other characters are ignored). If changed you must rebuild all search-indexes for skeletons that don’t use the search api provided by the appengine (ie all skeletons where searchIndex is None)

viur.security.contentSecurityPolicy

If set, viur will emit a CSP http-header with each request.

Use viur.core.securityheaders.addCspRule() to set this property.

viur.security.strictTransportSecurity

If set, viur will emit a HSTS http-header with each request.

Use viur.core.securityheaders.enableStrictTransportSecurity() to set this property. Only partially supported on the Appengine atm.

viur.security.publicKeyPins

If set, viur will emit a Public Key Pins http-header with each request.

Use securityheaders.setPublicKeyPins() to set this property.

Note

This is reserved for further use. It’s not yet supported on the appengine.

viur.security.xFrameOptions

If set, ViUR will emit a X-Frame-Options header.

Use viur.core.securityheaders.setXFrameOptions() to set this property.

viur.security.xXssProtection

ViUR will emit a X-XSS-Protection header if set (the default).

Use securityheaders.setXXssProtection() to set this property.

viur.security.xContentTypeOptions

ViUR will emit X-Content-Type-Options: nosniff Header unless set to False.

Use securityheaders.setXContentTypeNoSniff() to set this property.

viur.session.lifeTime

Specifies when sessions timeout.

The value must be given in seconds. Defaults to 60 minutes. If no request is received within that window, the session is terminated and the user will have to login again.

viur.session.persistentFieldsOnLogin

Preserve session values on login.

For security reasons, the session is reset when a user logs in. Only fields specified in this list will be kept on login.

from server import session, config
config["viur.session.persistentFieldsOnLogin"] = ["username"]

session.current["username"] = "john" # Will be kept after logging in
session.current["password"] = "secret" # Will be lost after logging in
session.current.markChanged()

viur.session.persistentFieldsOnLogout

Preserve session values on logout.

For security reasons, the session is reset when a user logs out. Only fields specified in this list will be kept.

For example, see viur.session.persistentFieldsOnLogin.

viur.tasks.customEnvironmentHandler

Preserve additional environment in deferred tasks.

If set, must be a tuple of two functions (serializeEnv, restoreEnv) for serializing/restoring your enviromental data. The serializeEnv function must not accept any parameter and return and json-serializable object with the information you need to preserve. The restoreEnv function receives that object and should write the information contained therein into the environment of that deferred request.

Admin configuration

admin.moduleGroups

Grouping modules within panes.

It is possible to group different modules into logical panes, so they share a single entry in the admin. This is done by choosing a prefix, which will be used to group the different modules.

conf[ "admin.moduleGroups" ] = [
   {"prefix":"Tea: ", "name": "Tea", "icon": "icons/modules/produktdatenbank.png" },
]

This example will add all modules, which descriptions starts with the prefix Tea: to the group Tea with the given icon.

admin.vi.name

Specifies a custom name in the vi admin.

conf["admin.vi.name"] = u"Admin"

Miscellaneous configuration

bugsnag.apiKey

ViUR has integrated support for bugsnag.

To enable reporting to bugsnag, just set your personal bugsnag API-Key, the rest will be determined automatically.

conf["bugsnag.apiKey"] = "your api key"