I have a strange problem with editing any page after its first SVN commit. I'm not sure whether it's my ikiwiki backport bug or my misunderstanding how ikiwiki works.

Assume that I have Foo page with any content and I want to put there link to Bar page and next create the page. I do following steps:

  1. Click Edit link on Foo page

  2. Put the link to Bar page there and commit it by clicking "Save Page" button

The Bar page is rendered correctly and now I can see ?Bar link. The URL in the address bar of my browser is

http://my.host.com/wiki/foo.html?updated

  1. Click ?Bar link

Now I can see textarea for editing of page. It's empty, of course.

The page doesn't exists in my SVN repo yet and my Apache server knows noting about it:

    $ find /my/ikiwiki/src/dir/ -type f -name bar.mdwn
    $ find /my/ikiwiki/dst/dir/ -type f -name bar.html
  1. Add some initial content and click "Save Page" button to commit changes

The Foo page also is rendered correctly and now I can see what I wrote. The URL in the address bar of my browser is

http://my.host.com/wiki/bar.html?updated

The page was added to the SVN repo and my Apache is able to serve it now:

    $ find /my/ikiwiki/src/dir/ -type f -name bar.mdwn
    /my/ikiwiki/src/dir/bar.mdwn
    $ find /my/ikiwiki/dst/dir/ -type f -name bar.html
    /my/ikiwiki/dst/dir/bar.html
  1. Change the content of Bar page by clicking Edit link

I can't do it, because the textarea is empty again. I have to run ikiwiki --setup ikiwiki.setup command by hand to rebuild the page. Then I can edit it.

Where is my mistake?

--Paweł

It's not clear which Edit link you clicked in step 5. Is it the link on the new page, or the old link back on page Foo that you clicked on before to create Bar? It would also be good to see the URL you're at in step 5. --Joey

It was Edit link on new Bar page, of course. The URL in step 5 was http://my.host.com/wiki/ikiwiki.cgi?page=bar&do=edit.

I've forget to add in my previous post that $pagesources{$page} (cgi_editpage subroutine of /usr/share/perl5/IkiWiki/CGI.pm file) doesn't exist in step 5. It exists after rebuilding all ikiwiki pages by hand.

BTW, where does ikiwiki store information about rendered pages? Is it /my/ikiwiki/src/dir/.ikiwiki/ directory?

--Paweł

Well, the missing %pagesources value explains the symptom for sure. ikiwiki stores its state in .ikiwiki/index, and that should include info about the new page you've created, including the source file for it, which is where the data in %pagesources comes from.

It sounds to me like somehow, when you commit a change to svn by saving the page, it rebuilds the wiki, but does not update the index file. Maybe it's crashing before it can save the index file. Or maybe it's possibly be misconfigured, and updating a different index file in a different copy of the source? You should be able to figure out what's going on my looking at how the index file changes (or not) when you create the new page. --Joey

I've checked that my ikiwiki really doesn't touch .ikiwiki/index file when I create and save a new page. In error.log file of my Apache2 server I can't see any "Permission denied" messages, but I suspect that a reason of my problem can be the bad access permissions:

 root@my.host:/my/ikiwiki/src/dir# ls -ld .ikiwiki/
 drwxrwsr-x  2 www-data src 4096 2007-01-11 10:00 .ikiwiki/
 root@my.host:/my/ikiwiki/src/dir# cd .ikiwiki/
 root@my.host:/my/ikiwiki/src/dir/.ikiwiki# ls -l
 razem 48
 -rw-rw-r--  1 www-data src 17353 2007-01-11 10:00 index
 -rw-rw-r--  1 www-data src     0 2007-01-11 10:17 lockfile
 -rw-------  1 www-data src 24576 2007-01-11 10:17 sessions.db
 -rw-------  1 www-data src     0 2006-11-15 14:45 sessions.db.lck
 -rw-------  1 www-data src   404 2007-01-08 10:24 userdb

What do you think about it? Does it look good? My ikiwiki runs under control of Apache2 server and it's configured to run as www-data user and www-data group. --Paweł

It's a bit weird to run ikiwiki as www-data. This means that www-data can write to your subversion repository? And the svn post-commit hook also runs as www-data? It certianly could be some permissions issue that is not being reported properly. --Joey

No, my SVN post-commit hook runs as root (uid) and www-data (gid). Only root user and src group have write permissions to my SVN repo.

Could you please show me your permissions for repodir, srcdir and destdir and how runs your Apache server? --Paweł

Ugh, root? My permissions setup is simple, ikiwiki runs as a single user, and that same user can commit to the svn repo and write to all files. --Joey

What's your user? Please show me result of ls -ld dir for directories above :) --Paweł

All my directories are 755 joey:joey. --Joey

Thanks! But I have another situation: a multiuser system and a few ikiwiki commiters. --Paweł

Joey, I think I've just fixed the permission, but my ikiwiki still doesn't update my .ikiwiki/index file. Could you please explain me when ikiwiki calls saveindex() subroutine? My ikiwiki doesn't do it when I create a new page and save it or when I update and save a existing page. It does it only when I run ikiwiki --setup ikiwiki.setup and I'm desperated...

BTW, where should I store my ikiwiki.setup file? It must be placed under $srcdir/.ikiwiki/ directory or it doesn't matter? Does ikiwiki.cgi wrapper know where the ikiwiki.setup file is stored? --Paweł

Sorry I am not indenting for my reply (in my browser the responses are very narrow.)

I also had problem with no webpages getting generated via the CGI unless I ran ikiwiki to regen manually. I can't find the discussion here about in the ikiwiki website though. I think it was removed and now I can't find it in the history. My problem was caused by not having a revision system defined, so it defaulted to subversion (but I didn't have that installed).

Note that that confusing default to svn has been changed.. And you're right about how the setup file is used below, BTW. --Joey

As for your .setup file you can put it anywhere. I don't think the CGI knows where it is at because its settings are set in the "wrapper". In my case, my setup file is in a different home and owned by a different user than the CGI or my generated website. By the way, I also don't keep my .ikiwiki private directory in my source directory by setting wikistatedir (which doesn't seem to be documented).

--JeremyReed

Never mind about indentation, Jeremy! :) Thanks a lot you're interested in my problem and you try to help me.

I use RCS backend and store my ikiwiki sources in SVN repo. Here is my SVN related settings:

   rcs => "svn",
   svnrepo => "/var/lib/svn/ikiwiki",
   svnpath => "trunk/pages",

I've noticed the following piece of code in /usr/share/perl5/IkiWiki/CGI.pm file (cgi_editpage() subroutine):

   # save page
   page_locked($page, $session);

   my $content=$form->field('editcontent');

   $content=~s/\r\n/\n/g;
   $content=~s/\r/\n/g;
   writefile($file, $config{srcdir}, $content);

   if ($config{rcs}) {
           # Here is RCS stuff
           # ...
   }
   else {
           require IkiWiki::Render;
           refresh();
           saveindex();
   }

   # The trailing question mark tries to avoid broken
   # caches and get the most recent version of the page.
   redirect($q, "$config{url}/".htmlpage($page)."?updated");

As you can see ikiwiki calls saveindex() subroutine if rcs variable is not defined. I don't understand it, because in this way ikiwiki doesn't update my .ikiwiki/index file. Joey, could you please enlight me here ;)

BTW, I also noticed wikistatedir variable in the ikiwiki code and I couldn't find any information about it in ikiwiki docs :) --Paweł

wikistatedir is a non-configurable internal value.

What happens during an edit with the code you quoted is that the "rcs stuff" results in a commit of the page to svn. This results in the ikiwiki svn post-commit hook running. The post-commit hook updates the wiki, and calls saveindex. That's why it's not called in the RCS path in the code above.

It sounds like your post-commit hook is still not set up, or is failing for some reason (permissions perhaps?) --Joey

OK, done! It was problem with permissions and not upgraded editpage.tmpl template :) --Paweł