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[[!meta title="inside .ikiwiki"]]

The .ikiwiki directory contains ikiwiki's internal state. Normally, you don't need to look in it, but here's some tips for how to do so if you need/want to.

the index

.ikiwiki/indexdb contains a cache of information about pages, as well as all persisitant state about pages. It used to be a (semi) human-readable text file, but is not anymore.

To dump the contents of the file, enter a perl command like this.

joey@kodama:~/src/joeywiki/.ikiwiki> perl -le 'use Storable; my $index=Storable::retrieve("indexdb"); use Data::Dumper; print Dumper $index' | head
$VAR1 = {
      'index' => {
                 'ctime' => 1199739528,
                 'dest' => [
                             'index.html'
                           ],
                 'mtime' => 1199739528,
                 'src' => 'index.mdwn',
                 'links' => [
                              'index/discussion',

the user database

.ikiwiki/userdb is the user database, which records preferences of all web users.

To list all users in the database, enter a perl command like this. Note that the output can include both registered users, and known openids.

joey@kodama:~/src/joeywiki/.ikiwiki> perl -le 'use Storable; my $userinfo=Storable::retrieve("userdb"); print $_ foreach keys %$userinfo'         
http://joey.kitenet.net/
foo

To list each user's email address:

joey@kodama:~/src/joeywiki/.ikiwiki> perl -le 'use Storable; my $userinfo=Storable::retrieve("userdb"); print $userinfo->{$_}->{email} foreach keys %$userinfo'

joey@kitenet.net

To dump the entire database contents:

joey@kodama:~/src/joeywiki/.ikiwiki> perl -le 'use Storable; my $userinfo=Storable::retrieve("userdb"); use Data::Dumper; print Dumper $userinfo'
$VAR1 = {
          'http://joey.kitenet.net/' => {
                                          'email' => 'joey@kitenet.net',
[...]

Editing values is simply a matter of changing values and calling Storable::nstore(). So to change a user's email address:

joey@kodama:~/src/joeywiki/.ikiwiki> perl -le 'use Storable; my $userinfo=Storable::retrieve("userdb"); $userinfo->{"foo"}->{email}=q{foo@bar}; Storable::lock_nstore($userinfo, "userdb")'

To remove that user:

joey@kodama:~/src/joeywiki/.ikiwiki> perl -le 'use Storable; my $userinfo=Storable::retrieve("userdb"); delete $userinfo->{"foo"}; Storable::lock_nstore($userinfo, "userdb")'

I've not written actual utilities to do this yet because I've only needed to do it rarely, and the data I've wanted has been different each time. --[[Joey]]

the session database

.ikiwiki/sessions.db is the session database. See the [[cpan CGI::Session]] documentation for more details.

lockfiles

In case you're curious, here's what the various lock files do.

  • .ikiwiki/lockfile is the master ikiwiki lock file. Ikiwiki takes this lock before reading/writing state.
  • .ikiwiki/commitlock is locked as a semophore, to disable the commit hook from doing anything.
  • .ikiwiki/cgilock is locked by the cgi wrapper, to ensure that only one ikiwiki process is run at a time to handle cgi requests.

plugin state files

Some plugins create other files to store their state.

  • .ikiwiki/aggregate is a plain text database used by the aggregate plugin to record feeds and known posts.
  • .ikiwiki/xapian/ is created by the search plugin, and contains xapian-omega configuration and the xapian database.