[tahoe-dev] User access

[Shawn Willden]

On Thursday 17 September 2009 01:15:08 pm Dimitri Yioulos wrote:
> Folks,
>
> I've just about got everything all figured out, but I'm wondering how other
> users on my system can use tahoe.  As it stands, all of the client node
> files were written to /myhomedirectory/.tahoe.  If another user tries to
> run a tahoe command, tahoe responds with:
>
> IOError: [Errno 2] No such file or directory:
> '/otherusersdirectory/.tahoe/node.url'
>
> How can I make tahoe "universally" usable (if there is such a thing). A
> step-by-step would be appreciated.

I'll be interested to see what the real experts say, but some ideas come to 
mind:

1.  They should all be able to use the web interface.  That's not very useful 
for storing files, but if they wanted to browse yours, and you gave them a 
dircap, they could.

2.  You could copy node.url to the .tahoe directory in all of their home 
directories.  The tahoe command line client is looking for that file to find 
out the URL of the web API (so the file probably 
contains "http://127.0.0.1:3456").

3.  You could make sure your .tahoe directory is publicly-readable (yeah, 
probably not a great idea) and tell them they have to use the '-d' option to 
tahoe command line commands.  Like "tahoe ls -d ~dmitri/.tahoe".  Not very 
user-friendly.

4.  You could tell them they have to use the '-u' option to tahoe command line 
commands.  Like:  "tahoe ls -u 'http://127.0.0.1:3456'".  Even less 
user-friendly than the previous.

5.  You could make a script that calls tahoe and adds the '-u' option and 
install it in a public path (e.g. /usr/local/bin).  Then they could type, 
e.g., "th ls".  Maybe even better (and simpler) would be a script that checks 
for the ~/.tahoe/node.url file and creates it if needed, with the right 
contents, then calls "tahoe $*".

	Shawn.