Configuring MediaGoblin

So! You’ve got MediaGoblin up and running, but you need to adjust some configuration parameters. Well you’ve come to the right place!

MediaGoblin’s config files

When configuring MediaGoblin, there are two files you might want to make local modified versions of, and one extra file that might be helpful to look at. Let’s examine these.

mediagoblin.ini

This is the config file for MediaGoblin, the application. If you want to tweak settings for MediaGoblin, you’ll usually tweak them here.

paste.ini

This is primarily a server configuration file, on the Python side (specifically, on the WSGI side, via paste deploy / paste script). It also sets up some middleware that you can mostly ignore, except to configure sessions… more on that later. If you are adding a different Python server other than fastcgi / plain HTTP, you might configure it here. You probably won’t need to change this file very much.

There’s one more file that you certainly won’t change unless you’re making coding contributions to mediagoblin, but which can be useful to read and reference:

mediagoblin/config_spec.ini

This file is actually a specification for mediagoblin.ini itself, as a config file! It defines types and defaults. Sometimes it’s a good place to look for documentation… or to find that hidden option that we didn’t tell you about. :)

Making local copies

Let’s assume you’re doing the virtualenv setup described elsewhere in this manual, and you need to make local tweaks to the config files. How do you do that? Let’s see.

To make changes to mediagoblin.ini

cp mediagoblin.ini mediagoblin_local.ini

To make changes to paste.ini

cp paste.ini paste_local.ini

From here you should be able to make direct adjustments to the files, and most of the commands described elsewhere in this manual will “notice” your local config files and use those instead of the non-local version.

Note

Note that all commands provide a way to pass in a specific config file also, usually by a -cf flag.

Common changes

Enabling email notifications

You’ll almost certainly want to enable sending email. By default, MediaGoblin doesn’t really do this… for the sake of developer convenience, it runs in “email debug mode”.

To make MediaGoblin send email, you need a mailer daemon.

Change this in your mediagoblin.ini file:

email_debug_mode = false

You should also change the “from” email address by setting email_sender_address. For example:

email_sender_address = "foo@example.com"

If you have more custom SMTP settings, you also have the following options at your disposal, which are all optional, and do exactly what they sound like.

• email_smtp_host

• email_smtp_port

• email_smtp_user

• email_smtp_pass

All other configuration changes

To be perfectly honest, there are quite a few options and we haven’t had time to document them all.

So here’s a cop-out section saying that if you get into trouble, hop onto IRC and we’ll help you out. Details for the IRC channel is on the join page of the website.

Celery

FIXME: List Celery configuration here.