The addsite command
Adding a site to Zotonic is done through the zotonic shell command. It syntax is like this:
zotonic addsite [options] <site_name>
This command creates a new site with [site_name] as the site’s name. This new site will be based on a so-called skeleton site. Currently there are four skeletons: ‘blog’, ‘empty’ and ‘nodb’. ‘blog’ is the default.
The addsite command is highly configurable and takes the following options:
| -s <skel> | Skeleton site (one of ‘blog’, ‘empty’, ‘nodb’; default: blog) |
| -H <host> | Site’s hostname (default: <site_name>.test) |
| -L | Create the site in the current directory and symlink it into the zotonic user directory |
| -g <remote> | Create a git repository in the site and push it to the given remote |
| -h <host> | Database host (default: localhost) |
| -p <port> | Database port (default: 5432) |
| -u <user> | Database user (default: zotonic) |
| -P <pass> | Database password (default: zotonic) |
| -d <name> | Database name (default: zotonic) |
| -n <schema> | Database schema (default: <site_name>) |
| -a <pass> | Admin password (default: admin) |
| -A <app> | If true, initializes a site app and a root supervisor when the site starts (default: false) |
| -U <umbrella> | If true, the site dir becomes a multi-app structure (default: false) |
Adding a site
When adding a site, the site will be created in the Zotonic user
directory. When -L is used, the site will be created in the
current directory (from which the addsite command is ran), and a
symlink into the Zotonic user directory will be made.
Before adding the site, the command will print out an overview of what it will do before continuing.
For instance, consider the following addsite command:
zotonic addsite -s blog myfirstblog
Will print out the following:
************
Warning!
************
Site: 'myfirstblog.test' cannot be reached.
Command 'host myfirstblog.test' must resolve to an IP address,
otherwise you won't be able to reach it after installing the site.
You can fix that by adding the following line to /etc/hosts:
127.0.0.1 myfirstblog.test
==== Add site ====
Site name: myfirstblog
Site URL: http://myfirstblog.test:8000/
Skeleton site: blog
Site directory: /home/user/zotonic/apps_user/myfirstblog
Admin password: admin
Database host: 127.0.0.1
Database port: 5432
Database user: zotonic
Database password: zotonic
Database name: zotonic
Database schema: myfirstblog
>>> Hit return to proceed...
First, it will warn you that the hostname that this site (initially) will have, is not yet resolvable. Add the hostname to your local hosts file to be able to see the site when it has finished installing.
After this warning, the addsite command will print out an overview of what it will do. It will show the site name, the URL the site will be reachable on, in which directory the site will be installed, et cetera. An overview of the database credentials and the admin password will also be printed. After hitting return, the site will be created and built for the first time. This will take a few moments, after which you will be able to visit the site’s URL in your browser.
Default values to zotonic addsite
The “addsite” subcommand checks a file called
$HOME/.zotonic-defaults for the default values to these
options. This file is a file in bash-syntax which can define the
following variables: SKEL, DBHOST, DBPORT, DBUSER,
DBPASSWORD, DBDATABASE, DBSCHEMA, ADMINPASSWORD,
SITEHOSTNAME, DO_LINK, TARGETDIR.
For instance, if you want all new Zotonic sites to be created in
/var/www and have hostnames like www.mysite.intra,
www.anothersite.intra, add the following to your
$HOME/.zotonic-defaults file:
export SITEHOSTNAME="www.%%SITE%%.intra"
export TARGETDIR=/var/www
Available skeleton sites
Zotonic comes with four different skeletons to base your site on.
blog- As a full example of a Zotonic website, it installs a front page with a listing of recent articles. As default example data, three example articles and a couple of images are also installed.
empty- An empty skeleton. No templates or dispatch rules whatsoever are created. You can use this skeleton to create a new site based on your own base templates, a custom CSS framework, etc.
nodb- Like the empty template, but this skeleton does not require a database connection. As such, the admin and content management interface is disabled, as those modules all require a database connection.