Making simple site-specific content changes

While the Customization Guide has details on a more flexible mechanism to customize the EPICS archiver appliance on a per-site basis, often what is required is a simple replacement of the images and text that are on the various pages. This can be done after unpacking the WAR file during deployment. The quickstart.sh and single_machine_install.sh scripts has some sample code that does this that can be used as a starting point.

  • These rely on the presence of a folder site_specific_content in the deployment folder.

  • All images in the folder site_specific_content/img is copied into the mgmt webapp’s ui/comm/img folder and can be used for site logos and so on.

  • The SyncStaticContentHeadersFooters is run on a file called template_changes.html

At a high level, after unzipping the mgmt.war into the Tomcat webapps folder, one can replace/modify the files to implement some simple content changes. The various HTML files that comprise the UI have sections delimited by special tags. For example, the home page has

<!-- @begin(site_contact_text) -->
This is the archiver appliance management console for the ...
<!-- @end(site_contact_text) -->

The simple java utility SyncStaticContentHeadersFooters can be used to replace content between these tags based on a master template. For example, create a master temple in /tmp/master_template.html that looks like so

<!-- @begin(site_header) -->
<div
  class="pageheader"
  style="background-image:url('comm/img/mylab.png'); background-size:1024px 400px;"
>
  <span class="apptitle" id="archiveInstallationTitle"
    >My Site Archiver Appliance</span
  >
</div>
<!-- @end(site_header) -->

<!-- @begin(site_contact_text) -->
This is the EPICS archiver appliance management console for my
site/beamline/program. Please contact me at 555 - 555 - 5555 if you have any
issues.
<!-- @end(site_contact_text) -->

Then run SyncStaticContentHeadersFooters using /tmp/master_template.html as the master template like so

java -cp ${TOMCAT_HOME}/webapps/mgmt/WEB-INF/classes:${TOMCAT_HOME}/webapps/mgmt/WEB-INF/lib/log4j-1.2.17.jar \
    org.epics.archiverappliance.mgmt.bpl.SyncStaticContentHeadersFooters \
    /tmp/master_template.html \
    ${TOMCAT_HOME}/webapps/mgmt/ui

to generate

image