User manual

Installation

Using Python wheel

You can install Hydrilla server and(or) builder using .whl files from the Releases page. Please consider verifying the downloads using provided cryptographic signatures.

Installing dependencies

Python3

Hydrilla requires Python interpreter in at least version 3.7. You'd typically use Python3 as provided by you operating system distribution. For example, on Debian-based systems (including Trisquel) you can install it with:

sudo apt install python3
pip

Pip is the package manager for Python. While not a direct dependency of Hydrilla, it is needed to utilize .whl files. You most likely also want to install pip as provided by your distro, e.g. for APT-based ones:

sudo apt install python3-pip
Python libraries

Hydrilla relies on the following Python packages:

If you don't have those dependencies installed, pip will automatically pull them from PyPI (except for reuse which would need to be installed separately with a command like python3 -m pip install reuse).

Nevertheless, you are encouraged to instead install the respective packages from your operating system's official repositories because those usually have stricter policies on stability, security and free licensing. In case of APT-based distributions the packages to install would be python3-jsonschema, python3-click, python3-flask and reuse1.

Installing Hydrilla

Let's assume you want to install version 1.0 of Hydrilla server. First, download and verify both2 hydrilla.builder-1.0-py3-none-any.whl and hydrilla-1.0-py3-none-any.whl. Then, run:

python3 -m pip install path/to/downloaded/hydrilla.builder-1.0-py3-none-any.whl path/to/downloaded/hydrilla-1.0-py3-none-any.whl

This will install Hydrilla for the current user. The commands hydrilla and hydrilla-builder will be made available in ~/.local/bin/.

Installing in virtualenv

If for example you don't want pip to install things under ~/.local/, you might choose to create a virtual Python environment. First, make sure you have the virtualenv tool installed3 (for example from APT package python3-virtualenv). Then, choose the folder in which you'd like to install the environment and run:

virtualenv -p python3 --system-site-packages path/to/chosen/folder

The --system-site-packages flag is not strictly necessary for it to work but is needed if you want packages inside the virtual environment to be able to see globally-installed dependencies.

Once the environment is created, you need to enter it by sourcing a script created by the virtualenv command, e.g.:

source path/to/chosen/folder/bin/activate

Afterwards, the python3 -m pip commands you enter in this shell will install packages inside this virtual environment. You can learn more about Python virtual environments from online tutorials and the virtualenv documentation.

Using APT

Hydrilla APT repository is hosted at https://hydrillarepos.koszko.org/apt/ and is signed with Wojtek's PGP key (fingerprint E9727060E3C5637C8A4F4B424BC5221C5A79FD1A). It is expected to work with modern releases of most APT-based distributions (including Debian bullseye and Trisquel nabia).

This APT repository can be used to install Hydrilla server and builder system-wide and to later update the installation. It has to be said that this also requires you to trust Wojtek's repository with your system's safety (a malicious APT repository could easily take over a system that uses it).

If you've decided you want to install the APT repository on your system, the easiest way to do so is by copy-pasting the following script into your POSIX shell (and then confirming with your password). You can of course modify it according to your needs.

__install_hydrilla_apt_repo() {
    local TMP="$1"
    local LISTS="$(cat <<EOF
deb     https://hydrillarepos.koszko.org/apt/ koszko main
deb-src https://hydrillarepos.koszko.org/apt/ koszko main
EOF
)"

    if ! wget -O "$TMP/koszko-keyring.gpg" https://hydrillarepos.koszko.org/apt/koszko-keyring.gpg; then
    echo "Error! Failed to download keyring file!" >&2
    return 1
    elif ! gpg --no-default-keyring --keyring "$TMP/koszko-keyring.gpg" --list-key E9727060E3C5637C8A4F4B424BC5221C5A79FD1A; then
    echo "Error! Invalid keyring file! Someone might be doing something nasty!" >&2
    return 1
    elif ! sudo cp "$TMP/koszko-keyring.gpg" /etc/apt/trusted.gpg.d/; then
    echo "Error!" >&2
    return 1
    elif ! printf %s "$LISTS" | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/hydrillarepos.list > /dev/null; then
    echo "Error!" >&2
    return 1
    fi

    sudo apt-get update
}

install_hydrilla_apt_repo() {
    local TMP="$(mktemp -d)"
    __install_hydrilla_apt_repo "$TMP"
    local RESULT="$?"

    rm -r "$TMP"

    return "$RESULT"
}

install_hydrilla_apt_repo

This snippet is idempotent (i.e. it can be run multiple times and the effect will be as if it was run once). In addition, it executes apt-get update command at the end so that your APT is immediately aware of the new repository and its contents.

After installing the repository you can install Hydrilla builder and server using the following commands:

sudo apt install python3-hydrilla.builder
sudo apt install python3-hydrilla # this alone will also pull the builder as a dependency

The packages install their modules under /usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/ which is seen by Python3 interpreters installed from APT. The hydrilla and hydrilla-builder commands get placed in /usr/bin/.

In addition, the python3-hydrilla package also includes sample WSGI script and Apache2 config files for Hydrilla under /usr/share/doc/python3-hydrilla/examples/.

Understanding the concepts

TODO

Running

With development server

TODO

With Apache2

This section describes how to configure an Apache2 virtual host to serve a Hydrilla repository. This guide is mostly meant to be useful to people running their own web servers.

You're going to need:

First, choose a directory where you want to store your serveable Haketilo packages. The default is /var/lib/hydrilla/malcontent. You can override this by saving the following file as /etc/hydrilla/config.json:

{
    // Path to directory from which Hydrilla will load packages metadata and serve files.
    "malcontent_dir": "/your/chosen/dir"
}

Fill the directory with some package files. You might for example clone the source package example repository and build it with something along the lines of:

sudo hydrilla-builder -s path/to/cloned/hydrilla-source-package-example/ -d /var/lib/hydrilla/malcontent/

Once done, grab Hydrilla's sample WSGI script and save it in your chosen location (the suggested one is /var/lib/hydrilla/wsgi/hydrilla.wsgi). Follow the comments in this script to modify it according to your needs.

Now, get the sample Apache2 configuration (there is also one for TLS-less deployment), also modify it according to your needs (in particular, you'll likely want to change hydrilla.example.com to some real domain of yours) and save under /etc/apache2/sites-available/your.chosen.config.name.conf.

You can now enable the configuration with:

sudo a2ensite your.chosen.config.name

You also need to reload or restart the Apache daemon for the configuration to be picked up (the command to do that varies between init systems). Once you do so, you can verify that the server is running properly. Consider running something like the following (replacing hydrilla.example.com with the domain name you used):

# The following assume that Hydrilla is loaded with the sample Haketilo package
curl http://hydrilla.example.com/mapping/helloapple.json
# -v flag will let us verify that the "Content-Type: application/json" header is present
curl -v http://hydrilla.example.com/resource/hello-message/2021.11.10
curl -v http://hydrilla.example.com/query?url=https://hydrillabugs.koszko.org/a/b/c

If everything is working as expected (i.e. JSON documents are properly served by Hydrilla&Apache2), you can start populating the "malcontent directory" with built packages of your choice.


  1. Reuse tool was first packaged for Debian Bookworm and is not yet available in Debian Bullseye nor in Trisquel Nabia. 

  2. Hydrilla server also depends on Hydrilla builder. 

  3. Since Python 3.3 a virtual environment can also be created without this tool. 

  4. If you want to run a Hydrilla server on shared hosting without root access, this might be achievable using a .htaccess file but is not documented right now.