Third Debian Report Project: Lyncee - A Debian virtual image web tool The project I'm working on is to create a web interface that lets the users create custom virtual Debian images. The project can roughly be separated as backend and frontend, and I've been working on the latter these past two weeks.
The frontend is a web interface where the user will be able to select all the configuration wanted for the virtual image. The build this web application, I'm using Python with Django. Django makes it very easy to deal with the underlying database system, allowing me to focus on functionality rather than DB idiosyncrasies. I've created a model of the configuration the user inputs. Django translates this model into a database scheme. I've also created templates for the user interface, that is what is shown to the user. First of all, a form where all the settings are selected. Some of these settings are: - image name (just an alias to identify this image) - architecture - boot_append (extra options for grub) - chroot_scripts (scripts that will on first boot) - filesystem (ext3, ...) - hostname - mirror - packages (list of packages) - password (root password) - release (squeeze, ...) - target (filename for the image, not sure if this will be kept) - vmsize (size of disk image) - user (user will have to be logged in actually) For now, the only other template is to see the status of the image creation. I've written all the code to get the request from the user through the form, process it and store in the database. Also, with the ID given to the user, he can check for the build status. I'm a little behind the schedule I wrote in my proposal. That is because I didn't expect the classes I was taking to be so time demanding. I had some exams and lots of assingments in the last two weeks, so I couldn't work as much as I wanted on my project. Fortunately, classes ended yesterday, so now I'm free to work on Lyncee and catch up with my scheduled work. What's next: I will be linking together the backend I've written with the frontend. This is simple, I only need to call the backend when we receive a request. I need to write some code for the backend to update the status of the creation in the database, so the user gets to know how his image build is going. For now, the templates are very spartan, I intend to prettify them, making the interface more intuitive and appealing. Also, now the user needs to upload a file with the names of all packages wanted. I will change this, letting the user choose the packages directly on the page. An autocomplete field would be awesome to select the packages. All my code is hosted on alioth. The project is at [0]. The git repo is at [1]. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- [0] https://alioth.debian.org/projects/lyncee/ [1] git.debian.org/git/lyncee/lyncee.git ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Miguel Gaiowski -- Miguel Fco. A. de Mattos Gaiowski _______________________________________________ Soc-coordination mailing list [email protected] http://lists.alioth.debian.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/soc-coordination
