RE: Questions about Public Inbox setup and configuration

[Soft Works <softworkz@hotmail.com>]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Kyle Meyer <kyle@kyleam.com>
> Sent: Sunday, December 26, 2021 9:14 PM
> To: Soft Works <softworkz@hotmail.com>
> Cc: meta@public-inbox.org
> Subject: Re: Questions about Public Inbox setup and configuration
> 
> Soft Works writes:
> 
> > Though, I have a number of questions to which I couldn’t find an answer.
> >
> > 1. At the top of the page it says "($INBOX_DIR/description missing)", even
> >    though the maildir contains a description file.
> >    (interestingly, several mirrors are 'suffering' for the same problem)
> >    How can I fix this?
> 
> Hmm, maildir?  Perhaps the issue is that you're placing this file in the
> wrong place.  The description file for each inbox should be at the
> directory pointed to by publicinbox.$name.inboxdir in
> ~/.public-inbox/config.  

Yup, I've been in fact looking at the wrong dir. I thought it must be the
right one as it already had a description file and the git inbox dir 
didn't. Maybe it should be automatically created by 'initialize'?
(given that many other mirrors seem to have the same issue)

I think the most confusing part was the $INBOX_DIR in the message, which 
makes you think it's an environment variable (which isn't set).

> The first time you add it, you may need to
> restart or send a SIGHUP to the httpd service, but my understanding is
> that should be unnecessary as of v1.7.0 (specifically commit b9e7ecbb,
> inbox: drop memoization/preload, cleanup expires caches).

Interestingly it was the other way round: it noted the change when adding
the description file, but it didn’t update on change, neither on rename
(and rename back). Not that this would matter in any way, though ;-)

Thanks a lot for pointing me in the right direction!

 
> > 2. How are the HTML views generated? Are there any templates that I could
> >    modify?
> 
> No, I don't think there are any templates you can modify.  In order to
> see how the HTML is generated, perhaps lib/PublicInbox/WWW*.pm files and
> lib/PublicInbox/View.pm would be the best source files to start with.
> 
> > 3. When a message cannot be found, it shows a list of mirrors to check for
> >    that message. How can I disable this?
> >    (it's more than unlikely that any of them would have it)
> 
> Those URLs are hard coded in lib/PublicInbox/ExtMsg.pm, and there's no
> way to change them or disable their display via configuration yet.
> However, there is a TODO comment in that file about making the list
> user-configurable, so I imagine Eric would be open to a patch.

Looking at the code files made me remember why I never got warm 
with Perl ;-)


> > 4. The services are running behind NGINX which forwards the requests to
> >    a local-only port. Now the www interface is showing URLs at many places
> >    like http://localhost:8123/mailbox instead of the public URL.
> >    How can I set this up correctly?
> 
> Have you tried something like
> 
>   proxy_set_header    HOST $host;
> 
> ?
> 
> See public-inbox's examples/nginx_proxy for an example.

I had seen the other example for running the httpd via systemd,
but I missed that one.

I think it would be really helpful when the documentation for the 
individual components would include references to the examples in that
folder. This would have saved me a lot of time as I had found the
other examples (for httpd setup) only accidentally and after quite
some time.

Anyway, I got it all set up and running well (scratch 2+3) and
big thanks to you for helping me!

Kind regards,
softworkz