This is the chapter of the MemberManual that describes the bare minimum that you need to know concerning our use of DomTool. This is meant to be a very brief HCoop-specific overview, compared to the DomTool/UserGuide page, which is more thorough.
Contents
Configuration files
Domtool has user-specified configuration files that determine how to set up a domain or subdomain. Each file contains all of the information needed to configure a single domain.
If you want Domtool to process these files automatically, then place them in the ~/.domtool directory. If you are just testing out a domain temporarily, the configuration files may be placed anywhere.
By default, this ~/.domtool directory is actually a symlink to the ~/.public/.domtool directory. This makes your configuration files readable by anyone, but writable only by you. If you want to make them private, then do the following.
rm ~/.domtool mkdir ~/.domtool fs setacl ~/.domtool domtool read # Do the following two commands if you have any files in ~/.public/.domtool mv ~/.public/.domtool/* ~/.domtool rmdir ~/.public/.domtool
Running domtool
In order to activate or test a domain, you must run the domtool command. It can take a long time to run, like many minutes, so have patience.
Testing your configuration
Running the following command tests your configuration file (here called "MYDOMAIN") for errors. Make sure to give the full path to the configuration file, unless you are currently in the same directory as the configuration file.
domtool -tc ~/.domtool/MYDOMAIN
The "-tc" argument means "type-check".
It is highly recommended to store your domtool configuration in a different directory while you are testing it (for example, ~/.domtool-test). The reason for this is that admins sometimes need to regenerate all domtool configuration files, and if any of your files in ~/.domtool have errors, none of them will be published. Once you are done testing, copy the known-good configuration files to ~/.domtool.
Activating your configuration
In order to make your changes go live, you need to run domtool without the "-tc" argument, as follows.
domtool ~/.domtool/MYDOMAIN
Further instructions
The intention of this page was to give you a very quick overview of the domtool command. To learn about how to create working configuration files, it is essential that you read the Domtool User Guide, and also see some examples.