pserwylo / dbfs

WebDAV server which exposes individual database rows as files, allowing you to edit things such as templates in your favourite editor.

What is dbfs?

dbfs exposes values from a database as files.

Why?

Many website frameworks store templates (HTML/JS/CSS/other?) as values in a database. In order to allow designers to edit them, they typically need to either use dodgey web-based editors, or copy the templates into their favourite editor, and then when finished, copy it back into the databse.

This allows you to edit values from the database directly in your favourite editor, and will save them back into the databse when you save the file.

Demo

Shell session accessing files

Here is a shell session that shows how it would look to access the database values as files (using the example .config file) and the database shown below.

$ cat /etc/fstab

http://localhost:8000 /mnt/dbfs davfs rw,user,noauto 0 0


$ mount /mnt/dbfs

Please enter the username to authenticate with server
http://localhost:8000 or hit enter for none.
  Username: test
Please enter the password to authenticate user test with server
http://localhost:8000 or hit enter for none.
  Password:  
/sbin/mount.davfs: warning: the server does not support locks


$ ls /mnt/dbfs/

dbfs_test


$ ls /mnt/dbfs/dbfs_test/

CSS                               webpage_template - HTML
newsletter_template - HTML        webpage_template - JavaScript
newsletter_template - JavaScript


$ ls /mnt/dbfs/dbfs_test/CSS/

About.css  Contact.css  Home.css


$ cat /mnt/dbfs/dbfs_test/CSS/About.css

h1 {
	color: green;
}

body {

}


$ ls "/mnt/dbfs/dbfs_test/newsletter_template - HTML/"

Registration complete.html


$ cat "/mnt/dbfs/dbfs_test/newsletter_template - HTML/"

Your email has been registered.


$ echo "<p>Your registration is complete.</p>" > \
       "/mnt/dbfs/dbfs_test/newsletter_template - HTML/"


$ cat "/mnt/dbfs/dbfs_test/newsletter_template - HTML/"

<p>Your registration is complete.</p>

Database for above session

The above filesystem layout was provided from the following database:

mysql> SHOW TABLES;
+---------------------+
| Tables_in_dbfs_test |
+---------------------+
| newsletter_template |
| webpage_template    |
+---------------------+
2 rows in set (0.00 sec)

mysql> SHOW FIELDS FROM newsletter_template;
+--------------+-----------+------+-----+-------------------+-----------------------------+
| Field        | Type      | Null | Key | Default           | Extra                       |
+--------------+-----------+------+-----+-------------------+-----------------------------+
| id           | int(11)   | NO   | PRI | NULL              | auto_increment              |
| label        | char(255) | NO   |     | NULL              |                             |
| modifiedDate | timestamp | NO   |     | CURRENT_TIMESTAMP | on update CURRENT_TIMESTAMP |
| css_content  | text      | YES  |     | NULL              |                             |
| html_content | text      | YES  |     | NULL              |                             |
+--------------+-----------+------+-----+-------------------+-----------------------------+
5 rows in set (0.14 sec)

ql> SELECT html_content FROM newsletter_template;
+----------------------------------------+
| html_content                           |
+----------------------------------------+
| <p>Your registration is complete.</p>  |
+----------------------------------------+
1 row in set (0.00 sec)

TODO

• Externalise SabreDAV dependency
• Wildcard database for folders, so that if their table is in any database, then it can be exposed. Also allow wildcards in table names, such as "*_articles" which would match "news_articles" and "blog_articles".
• Currently I presume we are using a MySQL database, because I append ';dbname=...' to the DSN for the PDO constructor.
• Validate all of the config values for folders and return null if invalid (after logging a message).
• Allow people to configure the authentication mechanism (e.g. Basic/Digest/LDAP)

Other Examples

Example Config File

The file dbfs.config contains documentation and examples for each of the config directives.

Example Database

Below is the SQL to create a test database, that should work well with the example dbfs.config that comes with dbfs.

We will have three fields all exposed from the one table.

CREATE DATABASE dbfs_test;

USE DATABASE dbfs_test;

CREATE TABLE webpage_template (
	id INT AUTO_INCREMENT PRIMARY KEY,
	label CHAR(255) NOT NULL,
	modifiedDate TIMESTAMP,
	css_content TEXT,
	js_content TEXT,
	html_content TEXT
);

INSERT INTO webpage_template ( 
	label, 
	css_content, 
	js_content, 
	html_content 
) VALUES ( 
	"Home",
	"h1 {\n\tcolor: red;\n}",
	"alert( 'Home page loaded' )",
	"<html>\n  <head><title>Home</title>\n  <body>\n  <h1>Home</h1>\n  </body>\n</html>"
), (
	"About",
	"h1 {\n\tcolor: green;\n}",
	"alert( 'About page loaded' )",
	"<html>\n  <head><title>About</title>\n  <body>\n  <h1>About</h1>\n  </body>\n</html>"
), (
	"Contact",
	"h1 {\n\tcolor: blue;\n}",
	"alert( 'Contact page loaded' )",
	"<html>\n  <head><title>Contact</title>\n  <body>\n  <h1>Contact</h1>\n  </body>\n</html>"
);

Example Server

PHP versions 5.4 and up have a built in webserver, that you can switch on by running the commandline php executable with the "-S" parameter.

The run-dev.sh script will start this server on localhost:8000