Me and Rapache

Posted at 1:01 pm in projects, rapache, ubuntu

For those who missed the announce on Ubuntu Planet, a new project - called Rapache - is born.

What is Rapache ?

Rapache is a simple Apache administration tool. It offers a GTK interface to allow extremely rapid VirtualHost creation and manipulation.

Picture that shows the main window of Rapache
Favicons add a nice touch to the list :-)

Personally, as a web developer, I felt the need of a simple tool to manage virtualhosts on my localhost for a long time, just because creating them at hand is way too time consuming than I’d like. Then, right after stumbling on this and reading users comments (some may be biased, I know), I decided to make such a tool by myself.

Funnily enough, me and Emgent had the same idea at the same time so, when he announced the project, I got in touch with him and we decided to join forces.

Rapache Virtualhost creation

What to expect

Personally I would have not announced the project before having already put together the basic program. We divided our roadmap in basically 3 stages, the first being my original previous goal.

  • Stage 0: basic functionality on localhost. Virtual hosts and Apache modules enabling/disabling/modification. Aimed to web developers.
  • Stage 1: Localization, more polished Gui. Functional separation before GUI and Libraries (i.e. a number of handy commands you can use from commandline). A number of handy wizards to handle common configuration issue. More Apache configuration options available from the GUI
  • Stage 2: Sky’s the limit ;-). Handling remote servers via SSH. Server bookmarking.

What not to expect

At the moment we’re relying on debian way to handle Apache configuration. So do not expect to be able to run Rapache on a non-debian system at lease before Stage 3, maybe not even afterwards. That’s mainly because the debian way of manage Apache confs is much more easy to handle than the upstream’s one.

In a way we’re creating Rapache for Ubuntu itself (and Debian, by reflex) rather than for Linux in general. Despite of that we’re open for people willing to help us hacking it to work on non-debian systems either.

Where to find us

 

Written by Stefano Forenza on June 14th, 2008

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11 Responses to 'Me and Rapache'

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  1. Vadim P. | 14 Jun 08 at 2:04 pm

    You misspelled, ‘Rapace’.

  2. Stefano Forenza | 14 Jun 08 at 2:06 pm

    Shame on me ! Thank you !

  3. Roel | 14 Jun 08 at 3:10 pm

    I played a little bit with the GUI, screenshots of the result here: http://zeus.ugent.be/~rulus/rapache/

    It’s far from perfect, but I think it’s better. If you’re interested in the Glade files, drop me a mail :)

  4. Stefano Forenza | 14 Jun 08 at 3:35 pm

    Thank you Roel. Your work is quite nice, but I have some problem with it.

    As for the main window, putting the notice on the bottom make it less visibile. Also should be noted what the restart notice is not visible all the time.
    De-aligning the restart notice from the restart button renders the restart action less intuitive for the user.

    Same should be said for the editing windows.

    I really should put the save / cancel buttons in place, instead (which you did). I should check the Human Interface Guidelines how to properly place those.

    Also, next time, feel free to upload your .glade files as long as the screenshots.

    Thank you very much for your ideas, and keep hacking !

  5. Roel | 14 Jun 08 at 3:45 pm

    Thanks for the reaction; I added the .glade files (should have done that right away).

    The grouping of the restart button with the notice is indeed better, I didn’t realise the button is not shown all the time.

    From a user perspective, I think notices should be placed at the bottom of the window. I mainly focus on the bottom of windows because that’s usually where the buttons are. I’m not sure what the guidelines say about this however.

    You can do whatever you like with the ideas and the files. Good luck with the project!

  6. Laudeci Oliveira "Pretto" | 14 Jun 08 at 4:41 pm

    I really like that project, I planned to do something like that before but APTonCD got all of my time.

    Nice work, keep going :)

    I will be very glad if I could help with something.

    Cheers.

  7. Tiago | 15 Jun 08 at 1:12 am

    Seems like a great software. Keep it up!

  8. Vadim P. | 15 Jun 08 at 2:41 am

    @Roel: How did you get Glade to do Bonobo? I’ve been looking to make use it of (for the dock actually, because gtkhandlebox is a bit limiting). But I couldn’t find an option in glade on how to do it.

    And, this is looking very promising. I’d help but I’m already involved in helping gufw (gui for the ufw in ubuntu). 2 GUI nice GUI projects, +1 for… gui users! :)

  9. Vitor Pamplona | 15 Jun 08 at 3:06 am

    Wow! Great! Like we say here: You hit the Duck!

    Congratz.

  10. Roel | 15 Jun 08 at 9:43 am

    @Vadim: GNOME support for Glade is provided in the glade-gnome(-3) package.

  11. Stefano Forenza | 15 Jun 08 at 10:35 am

    @Vadim P.: we could partner with gufw developer to form the “Grand Alliance to Save Lazy Sysadmins From Extinction” :-)

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