Web Interface to rysnc

[Frank Perugini]

Joseph,

Thanks for the reply. I would be interested in your File::Rsync::Safe
module. When you are ready I would be happy to beta test for you. Sounds
like I would run into the same problems you did when you had it setup. Do
you have any of that original work?

My problem right now is the transport layer for rsync. I already have ssh
configured on both dev and production servers. We use it for remote shells
for maintenance. ssh is currently set up to use passwords. When I run rsync
sessions and specify ssh as the transport, I get prompted interactively for
a password. I know I can use SSH keys with no passphrase, but I like the
extra security of passwords. I have been trying to wrap the rsync command
using the Expect module, but having a few problems right now. I don't know
if this will work out.


-Frank

-----Original Message-----
From: Joseph Annino [mailto:jannino at jannino.com]
Sent: Wednesday, February 13, 2002 8:55 PM
To: Frank Perugini; rsync at lists.samba.org
Subject: Re: Web Interface to rysnc


It was an internal use only tool I no longer have access to, but I did setup
a command line version of something like this, and a simple web interface
was later put on top of it.

Because the directory structure of the development server mirrored that of
the live server, just a list of names of files in the development server
would be passed to the script.  It would connect to the live server and do
the copy.  It checked all paths through a config file that specified what
paths different users could update.  The script just checked which unix
account invoked it to determine the user.

All copies are done atomicly, meaning files are copied to directory_new,
directory is renamed as directory_old, directory_new is renamed as
directory, and then direcotry_old is deleted.  This results in only split
second downtime, as well as not ending up in some weird state if the
transfer gives up in the middle.

One big issue that wasn't foreseen in the first version, deleting files.

I am working on a module File::Rsync::Safe, for doing the kind of atomic
copies I mentioned above, among other things.  I haven't announced it yet
because I'm still working on getting the people paying for my work to
understand what the GPL is, but they will come around shortly.


--
Joseph Annino Consulting - Perl, PHP, MySQL, Oracle, etc.
jannino at jannino.com - http://www.jannino.com


On 2/13/02 7:30 PM, "Frank Perugini" <frankp at web-worx.com> wrote:

> Greetings All,
>
> I am planning on authoring a web-based (CGI) interface to rsync. The idea
is
> to build a fool-proof interface for my web designers to push content
changes
> from our development server to our live production server. I am talking
> about an interface which allows point-n-click navigation of file system
> folders and the ability to push files. These users are both MAC and
Windows
> based. We are a web design and hosting company.
>
> I have been monitoring this group and other newsgroups and experimenting
> with rsync. I know there is a perl module that wraps rsync, and I will
> probably use it.
>
> Does anyone know if anyone else has already undertook a project of this
type
> already? I don't want to re-invent the wheel. I have not seen much mention
> of any web-based interfaces or wrappers (other than the perl module).
> There's usually people creating web-based interfaces to just about
> everything, but I have not seen this yet. I think it can be a very useful
> system.
>
> Regards,
>
> -Frank
>
>