Creating a private wiki with MoinMoin

MoinMoin has Access Control Lists (ACLs) so I figured it would work for creating a private wiki on the internet.

Unfortunately this is against the MoinMoin philosophy so it took a little work.

MoinMoin pages can be protected by adding a processing instruction to the top of the page


#acl Known:read,write


This would work but is not what I was looking for since I want all pages to be protected. I don’t want the users to have to remember to add the acl to every page.

In the Security section of wikiconfig.py I changed the default acl rights so a user must be logged in to read or write wiki pages.


# the user must be logged in to view or write pages
acl_rights_default = u'Known:read,write'


This works great except that anyone can just create an account and view pages. So I also needed to disable user registration. MoinMoin uses the same form for user creation and editing users, so a file system hack worked the best.


$ cd /path/to/wiki/instance/data
$ chmod -w users


This allows users with existing accounts to edit them, but if someone attempts to create a user account, they get a nice IOError since MoinMoin can’t create the file. Effective but ugly.

Last I hacked userform.py to catch this error and display an message

When user registration was disabled the IOError was on line 155 of userform.py. theuser.save() became


try:
  theuser.save()
except IOError:
  return _("User registration is disabled")


This solution seems to work fine. Adding users is a bit of a pain, but it doesn’t happen often. Since users can’t register, I need to create the new accounts. I enable user creation (chmod +w users), use the UI to create users and then disable user registration again (chmod -w users).