WEBCIT for the Citadel System version 5.23 Copyright (C) 1996-2004 by the authors. Portions written by: Art Cancro Nathan Bryant Nick Grossman Andru Luvisi Kevin Roth This program is free software released under the terms of the GNU General Public License. Please read COPYING.txt for more licensing information. INTRODUCTION ------------ Citadel is a sophisticated BBS and groupware package which allows multiple users to simultaneously access the system using a variety of user interfaces. This package (WebCit) is a "middleware" package which presents an HTML/HTTP user interface to the Citadel system. What this means in practice is that after you've installed WebCit, users can access all functions of your system using any web browser. Since this may be the first Citadel experience for many new users, the screens have been designed to be attractive and easy to navigate. INSTALLATION ------------ Unline some web-based packages, WebCit contains its own standalone HTTP engine. As a result, you can get it running quickly without all that tedious mucking about with Apache configuration files and directories. WebCit is not intended to replace your Apache server, however -- it *only* provides a front end to Citadel. If you do not have another web server running, you may run WebCit on port 80; however, in the more likely situation that you have Apache or some other web server listening on port 80, you must run WebCit on another port. The default is port 2000. To compile from source, enter the usual commands: ./configure --prefix=/usr/local/webcit [or whatever directory you prefer] make make install Then to initialize it: cd /usr/local/webcit ./setup After running setup, you just point your web browser to whatever port you specified, such as: http://your.host.name:2000 ...and log in. The included "setup" program is basically just an installation helper that asks a series of questions and then adds the appropriate line to inittab to start WebCit. For most installations, this will do just fine. If you have special circumstances, or if you'd prefer to configure WebCit manually, you may skip the setup program. Instead, open /etc/inittab and add an entry something like this: wc:2345:respawn:/usr/local/webcit/webserver Several command-line options are also available. Here's the usage for the "webserver" program: webserver [-i ip_addr] [-p http_port] [-s] [-t tracefile] [-c] [remotehost [remoteport]] *or* webserver [-i ip_addr] [-p http_port] [-s] [-t tracefile] [-c] uds /your/citadel/directory Explained: -> ip_addr: the IP address on which you wish your WebCit server to run. You can leave this out, in which case WebCit will listen on all available network interfaces. Normally this will be the case, but if you are running multiple Citadel systems on one host, it can be useful. -> http_port: the TCP port on which you wish your WebCit server to run. This can be any port number at all; there is no standard. Naturally, you'll want to create a link to this port on your system's regular web pages (presumably on an Apache server running on port 80). Or, if you are installing WebCit on a dedicated server, then you might choose to use port 80 after all. -> tracefile: where you want WebCit to log to. This can be a file, a virtual console, or /dev/null to suppress logging altogether. -> The "-c" option causes WebCit to output an extra cookie containing the identity of the WebCit server. The cookie will look like this: Set-cookie: wcserver=your.host.name This is useful if you have a cluster of WebCit servers sitting behind a load balancer, and the load balancer has the ability to use cookies to keep track of which server to send HTTP requests to. -> The "-s" option causes WebCit to present an HTTPS (SSL-encrypted) web service. If you want to do both HTTP and HTTPS, you can simply run two instances of WebCit on two different ports. -> remotehost: the name or IP address of the host on which your Citadel server is running. The default is "localhost". -> remoteport: the port number on which your Citadel server is running. The default is port 504, the IANA-designated standard port for Citadel. -> "uds" is a keyword which tells WebCit that you wish to connect to a Citadel server running on the same computer, rather than using a TCP/IP socket. /your/citadel/directory should be set to the actual name of the directory in which you have Citadel installed (such as /usr/local/citadel). If you run Citadel and WebCit on the same computer, this is recommended, as it will run much faster. GRAPHICS -------- WebCit contains a small amount of graphics (buttons, etc.) which are kept in its "static" subdirectory. All site-specific graphics, however, are fetched from the Citadel server. The "images" directory on a Citadel system contains these graphics. The ones which you may be interested in are: -> background.gif: a background texture displayed under all web pages -> hello.gif: your system's logo. It is displayed along with the logon banner, and on the top left corner of each page. If you would like to deploy a "favicon.ico" graphic, please put it in the static/ directory. WebCit will properly serve it from there. CALENDAR SERVICE ---------------- WebCit contains support for calendaring and scheduling. In order to use it you must have libical v0.24 (or newer) on your system. You must also be running a Citadel server with calendaring support. The calendar service will be automatically configured and installed if your host system supports it. WebCit also provides Kolab-compatible free/busy data for calendar clients. Unlike the Kolab server, however, there is no need for each user to "publish" free/busy data -- it is generated on-the-fly from the server-side calendar of the user being queried. Note: in order to support Kolab clients, you must have WebCit running in HTTPS mode on port 443, because that is what Kolab clients will be expecting. HTTPS (encryption) SUPPORT -------------------------- WebCit now supports HTTPS for encrypted connections. When a secure server port is specified via the "-s" flag, an HTTPS service is enabled. The service will look in the "keys" directory for the following files: citadel.key (your server's private key) citadel.csr (a certificate signing request) citadel.cer (your server's public certificate) If any of these files are not found, WebCit will first attempt to link to the SSL files in the Citadel service's directory (if Citadel is running on the same host as WebCit), and if that does not succeed, it will automatically generate a key and certificate. It is up to you to decide whether to use an automatically generated, self-signed certificate, or purchase a certificate signed by a well known authority. CONCLUSION ---------- That's all you need to know to get started. If you have any questions or comments, please visit UNCENSORED! BBS, the home of Citadel, at uncensored.citadel.org.