coin

The COIN project

Coin is Illyse's Information System, designed to manage both members and Internet accesses, such as through DSL, VPN, wireless…

It is written in Django, and features a generic configuration interface, which allows to implement custom backends for different technologies. Currently implemented is a LDAP-based backend for OpenVPN, and a very simple DSL backend, without any authentication (useful for "white label" DSL).

Coin currently only works with python2, because python-ldap is (as of 2013) not compatible with python3.

The project page (issue, wiki, etc) is here:

https://code.ffdn.org/FFDN/coin/

A mailing list is available, for both users and developers: https://listes.illyse.org/wws/info/si

Demo

A demo of COIN is publicly available at https://coin-dev.illyse.org

• Login: ffdn
• Password: internet

This user account has access to the administration interface.

Extending Coin

If you want to write your own backend, see EXTENDING.md.

Quickstart

Virtualenv

Using a virtualenv is recommended. On Debian, install python-virtualenv. On Archlinux, the package is called python2-virtualenv, and you must replace the virtualenv command with virtualenv2 in the following.

To create the virtualenv (the first time):

virtualenv ~/tmp/venv-illyse

To activate the virtualenv (you need to do this each time you work on the project):

. ~/tmp/venv-illyse/bin/activate

Install dependencies. On Debian, you will probably need the python-dev, python-pip, libldap-dev, libpq-dev, libsasl2-dev, and libjpeg-dev packages.

sudo apt-get install python-dev python-pip libldap2-dev libpq-dev libsasl2-dev libjpeg-dev

You need a setuptools >= 18.5. If you don't meet that requirement (Debian Jessie does not), run:

pip install setuptools>=18.5

In any case, you then need to install coin python dependencies:

pip install -r requirements.txt

You should now be able to run python manage.py (within the virtualenv, obviously) without error.

Settings

The coin/settings_local.py file is ignored by Git: feel free to override any setting by writing into that file. For example, to override the DEBUG settings:

echo '# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-' > coin/settings_local.py
echo 'DEBUG = TEMPLATE_DEBUG = True' >> coin/settings_local.py

See the end of this README for a reference of available configuration settings.

Database

At this point, you should setup your database: we highly recommend PostgreSQL. SQLite might work, but some features will not be available:

• automatic allocation of IP subnets (needs proper subnet implementation in the database)
• sending automated emails to remind of expiring membership fee (needs aggregation on date fields, see Django doc)

For more information on the database setup, see https://www.illyse.org/projects/ils-si/wiki/Mise_en_place_environnement_de_dev

The first time, you need to create the database, create a superuser, and import some base data to play with:

python manage.py migrate
python manage.py createsuperuser
python manage.py loaddata offers ip_pool

Note that the superuser will be inserted into the LDAP backend exactly in the same way as all other members, so you should use a real account (not just admin/admin).

Then, at each code update, you will only need to update dependencies and apply new migrations:

pip install -r requirements.txt
python manage.py migrate

At this point, Django should run correctly:

python manage.py runserver

Available commands

Some useful administration commands are available via manage.py.

python manage.py members_email: returns email addresses of all members, one per line. This may be useful to automatically feed a mailing list software. Note that membership is based on the status field of users, not on membership fees. That is, even if a member has forgot to renew his or her membership fee, his or her address will still show up in this list.

python manage.py charge_subscriptions: generate invoices (including a PDF version) for each subscriber. You probably want to run this command every month as a cron task, see below.

python manage.py call_for_membership_fees: send reminder emails to members whose membership fee is about to expire or is already expired (1 month before, on the day of expiration, 1 month after, 2 months after, and 3 months after). You should run this command in a cron job every day.

python manage.py offer_subscriptions_count: Returns subscription count grouped by offer type.

Configuration

You should first setup the sites application, in the admin. The domain name configured there is used for outgoing emails.

LDAP

By default, LDAP support is disabled. If you want to use LDAP (for instance for the OpenVPN/LDAP backend, or for your own backend), see the configuration file coin/settings_local.example-illyse.py.

ISP-specific configuration

The main place to customize Coin for your ISP is the IspDatabase application, in the admin. Information entered in this application has two purposes:

1) generate a JSON file usable by http://db.ffdn.org/

2) customize the user interface (postal address, bank account, ISP name & logo...)

Some bits of configuration are done in settings.py: LDAP branches, RSS feeds to display on the home page, and so on. Lastly, it is possible to override all Coin templates (i.e. for user views and emails), see below.

Sending emails

Coin sends mails, you might want to customize the sender address:

• DEFAULT_FROM_EMAIL app-wide setting
• administrative email field, from ISPDatabase app, if set, will take precedence over DEFAULT_FROM_EMAIL for administrative emails (welcome email and membership fees), will take precedence (if filled).

Cron tasks

You may want to run cron jobs for repetitive tasks.

The command that generates invoices should be run every day, so that invoices for new subscriptions are created automatically. On the first day of each month, invoices will be generated for all subscriptions. This will run the command at 23:59 every day:

59 23 * * * /home/coin/venv/bin/python manage.py charge_subscriptions`

To send reminder emails for membership fee expiration:

42 3 * * * /home/coin/venv/bin/python manage.py call_for_membership_fees`

If you want to be notified by email each time a reminder email is sent, you can set an email address in the crontab:

MAILTO=tresorier@myisp.fr

Customizing templates

You may want to override some of the (HTML or email) templates to better suit your structure needs.

Coin allows you to have a folder of custom templates that will contain your templates, which gets loaded prior to coin builtins.

With this method, several templates can be overridden:

• template files in coin/templates/
• template files in coin/<app_name>/templates/ for all active applications

Do once (setup)

• Create a folder dedicated to your custom templates (hint: outside of coin git tree is better).
• Register that folder in the EXTRA_TEMPLATE_DIRS settings.

For instance, in settings_local.py:

EXTRA_TEMPLATE_DIRS = ('/home/coin/my-folder/templates',)

For each template you want to override

Copy the template you want to override to the right place in your custom folder (that's the hard part, see the example).

Example

Say we want to override the template located at coin/members/templates/members/emails/call_for_membership_fees.html and we set EXTRA_TEMPLATE_DIRS = ('/home/coin/my-folder/templates',) in settings.

Then make a copy of the template file (and customize it) at /home/coin/my-folder/templates/members/emails/call_for_membership_fees.html

Good to go :-)

Using optional apps

Some apps are not enabled by default :

• vpn: Management of OpenVPN subscription and credentials through LDAP
• simple_dsl: Simple DSL subscriptions, without handling any authentication backend or user configuration ("marque blanche")

You can enable them using the EXTRA_INSTALLED_APPS setting. E.g. in settings_local.py:

EXTRA_INSTALLED_APPS = (
    'vpn',
)

If you enable an extra-app after initial installation, make sure to sync database :

./manage.py migrate

nb: extra apps are loaded after the builtin apps.

Settings

List of available settings in your settings_local.py file.

• EXTRA_INSTALLED_APPS: See Customizing app list
• EXTRA_TEMPLATE_DIRS: See Customizing templates
• LDAP_ACTIVATE: See LDAP
• MEMBER_MEMBERSHIP_INFO_URL: Link to a page with information on how to become a member or pay the membership fee
• SUBSCRIPTION_REFERENCE: Pattern used to display a unique reference for any subscription. Helpful for bank wire transfer identification

More information

For the rest of the setup (database, LDAP), see https://www.illyse.org/projects/ils-si/wiki/Mise_en_place_environnement_de_dev

For real production deployment, see file DEPLOYMENT.md.