mlmmj-rbarchiver(1) - Convert mlmmj MLs to an HTML archive

mlmmj-rbarchiver(1)
General Commands Manual
mlmmj-rbarchiver(1)

NAME

mlmmj-rbarchiver - Convert mlmmj MLs to an HTML archive

SYNPOSIS

mlmmj-rbarchive -i INDIR -o OUTDIR OPTIONS

DESCRIPTION

mlmmj-rbarchive converts an mlmmj mailinglist into a browsable HTML archive. You can point your webserver to the resulting directory and thereby serve it as a (public) webarchive for the mailinglist.

USAGE

The -i and -o options are required and the program will abort if any of them is missing. The former specifies the root directory of the mlmmj mailinglist you want to process, whereas the latter specifies the directory the HTML will be outputted to. To be exact, the program will take the archive/ subdirectory of the input directory for processing and will output to a directory named after the processed ML below the output directory.

OPTIONS

-a EMAIL, --admin EMAIL: Administrative Email contact.
-c FILE, --config-file FILE: Configuration file to read options from. See below for more information on this.
-C DIR, --cachedir DIR: Cache directory for storing the sorted emails. Usually this is set automatically to some temporary directory, but you can set this to a permanent directory if you want. This will cause the program to not regenerate the entire ML archive, but instead use what can be found in that cache directory, resulting in a faster processing, especially if the mailinglist in question is large.
-h, --help: Display a short option summary.
-H HTML, --header HTML: A short HTML snippet placed at the top of each page. Set this to something like <p>My Mailinglist archive</p>.
-i DIR, --indir DIR: The mlmmj mailinglist to process. Required.
-l, --levels NUM: Maximum indentation level before the threads are flattened.
-m BINARY, --mhonarc BINARY: Path to the mhonarc(1) executable. Usually this is found out automatically.
-o DIR, --outdir DIR: The target directory for the HTML files. Required.
-s, --style STRING: CSS link to include in each HTML files’ <head> section. This is copied as-is, you have to provide the CSS file yourself.
-S, --search URL: Add a link called "search" to the navigation bar that links to the URL specified here. Nothing more is done, you have to implement the target yourself.
-v, --version: Print the version number and exit.
-V, --verbose: Give more information while processing.
-x, --no-checknoarchive: Do not check the X-NoArchive email header that instructs archiving software to ignore an email. Note that the default behaviour is to honour that header.

CONFIGURATION FILE

The -c option allows you to specify a configuration file so you don’t have to pass all the above commandline options again and again. Instead you can set them in the file and have the program read that file on startup. Most things specifyable via the commandline can be set in the config file too, so I encourage you to use such a file to keep your commands clean. The mapping of the configuration file directives to the above commandline options is as follows:

┌────────────────┬────────┐
│ Directive      │ Option │
├────────────────┼────────┤
│ archiveadmin   │ -a     │
│ cachedir       │ -c     │
│ checknoarchive │ -x     │
│ header         │ -H     │
│ indir          │ -i     │
│ mhonarc        │ -m     │
│ outdir         │ -o     │
│ tlevels        │ -l     │
│ searchtarget   │ -S     │
│ stylefile      │ -s     │
└────────────────┴────────┘

See the example configuration file provided in the extra/ directory in the source for concrete usage instructions.

EXAMPLE

Suppose you want to process the mlmmj mailinglist at /var/spool/mlmmj/mymailinglist and output the HTML to the directory /var/www/mailarchive/mymailinglist. This can be achieved as follows:

$ mlmmj-rbarchive -i /var/spool/mlmmj/mymailinglist -o /var/www/mailarchive

Note you don’t have to specify the ML subdirectory, this is created automatically for you.

The resulting directory /var/www/mailarchive/mymailinglist will contain all messages sent to the ML converted to HTML. Note this does not create a toplevel index.html file for you, so you probably want to create one that contains information about how to subscribe/unsubscribe from the mailinglists archived at the website. That file will be left alone by mlmmj-rbarchive.

An example cron(8) entry for periodically running that command could look like this:

0 2 * * * mlmmj-rbarchive -i /var/spool/mymailinglist -o /var/www/mailarchive

That would run the shown command every day at 02:00 in the night.

AUTHOR

Marvin Gülker <quintus@quintilianus.eu>