ELOG - Syntax of elogd.cfg

[back to Administrator's Guide]

* Server : [Global] - Logbooks : [General] [Logbook groups] [Attributes] [Conditional Attributes] [E-mail] [Access Control] [Flags] [Themes] [Mirroring] *

Global and individual logbook options for an ELOG server

The configuration file elogd.cfg contains entries which define the structure of logbooks and the behaviour of elogd. The file has a simple ASCII format. Each logbook is defined by a [<name>] section where <name> is the name of the logbook. The [global] section is used for settings common to all logbooks. Each line contains a setting name, followed by an equal sign and the value for this setting. Lines starting with ";" are treated as comments.

Here is a simple example, which define two logbooks, "Linux" and "PC":

Global options

The notation of the following options is such that items enclosed by "<" and ">" should be replaced by a specific string. If a value contains blanks (like a complete sentence), it should not be enclosed in quotation marks.

If a setting has a number of possible options, they are shown in the form option1|option2|..., meaning that one of the options (without any vertical bar) should be used. The following options are specific to the [global] section:

Groups of logbooks

If installations have very many logbooks, it can be hard to navigate between them. To make things more structured, it is possible to build a hierarchy of logbooks. A logbook group can contain any number of logbooks as well as other logbook groups. The hierarchy is defined with the the option

Group <group name> = <Logbook1>, <Logbook2>, <other group>

in the [global] section of the configuration file.

To define following logbook hierarchy:

one would use following statements:

The logbook tabs would then look like this:

Where the selected group or logbook becomes blue. The lower groups/logbooks change according to the selected upper group. Please note that a logbook can be contained in more than one group, but then it should not be the first logbook in those groups. The colors of the tabs and the title bar can be specified in the CSS file.

Top groups

Sometimes groups of logbooks should be completely separate. Imagine two groups of logbooks, one for the engineering department and one for the administration department. These groups should have different administrators, and the logbook tabs at the top of the screen should not show the logbooks from the other department. Prior to ELOG version 2.4.1, one had to run two elogd servers in parallel, listening under different ports. Since 2.4.1, one can achieve the same behaviour using Top groups. The configuration could look like this:

Note that there can be a [global] section for each top level group of logbooks. The rule is that a configuration setting in an individual logbook section overrides a setting in the [global <top group>] setting, which by itsel overrides a setting in the [global] section. This way one can define settings for all top level groups (such as the SMTP host) in the [global] section, and define different password files and administrators in the individual top level group sections.

If top groups are used, the root of the elogd server is not accessible any more. Presume that elogd is accessible normally under http://your.host:8080/, this URL becomes invalid for top groups, to avoid the case that one group can "see" the logbooks of the other groups. Instead, one has to append the top group name to the URL, such as http://your.host:8080/engineering or http://your.host:8080/administration. If someone does not know the top group name, one cannot see the list of logbooks there, so the groups become completely independent of each other. If this feature is not wanted, it can be disabled by setting Show top groups = 1.
Individual logbook options

For each logbook, there is a section with the logbook name in square brackets, so that each logbook can have different options. If an option is not present in a logbook section, then the system tries to locate that option in the [global] section. Thus if the following options are placed in the [global] section, they are defaults for all logbooks. If they are present in the [global] and in the logbook section, the logbook option is used.

Here are the available options, by broad categories:

General options
Attributes