Just as SIPA stands for a ball over the net game[1], the lesser known Supreme Information Providing Application does just the same -- sending packets over the internet.

This project is a flask-based webserver developed by members of the student network Dresden.

Please note that SIPA has been built to fit our specific purposes. This means that there will be features you probably won't need, such as the traffic monitoring or splitting the login process into certain divisions.

To build the image, cd into your instance of sipa (which contains the Dockerfile) and run

docker build -t sipa .

Now, you have basically two possibilities to use sipa:

• Using uwsgi: This is the standard option. Just run:

docker run --name sipa -d sipa

Note that in order to use above example, you have to use another docker container, i.e. an nginx instance, which is linked to the sipa container. If you don't want to do this, you have to expose port 5000 adding -p 5000:5000 as a parameter.

• Using http: This is an option you have to envoke manually. To use it, run

docker run --name sipa -p 5000:5000 -d sipa python sipa.py --exposed

If you want to use sipa for development, adding --debug after sipa.py and mounting your sipa folder using -v <path>:/home/sipa/sipa is recommended.

In the folder content/ you can place markdown files to use them as content pages as well as news. The folder structure has to look like this, following the conditions explained below:

content
├── images
│   ├── image.png
│   └── logo.png
├── legal
│   ├── impressum.de.md
│   ├── impressum.en.md
│   ├── index.de.md
│   └── index.en.md
├── news
│   ├── 2015-03-11-new_website.de.md
│   ├── 2015-03-11-new_website.en.md
│   ├── index.de.md
│   └── index.en.md
└── support
    ├── contacts.de.md
    ├── contacts.en.md
    ├── faq.de.md
    ├── faq.en.md
    ├── index.de.md
    └── index.en.md

The navigation bar is built by scanning every directory for *.md-files. Directories containing the latter are then expected to contain an index file for every language code, e.g. index.en.md These index files decide whether it will appear in the navigation bar and which title it will be displayed with.

The index files have to contain certain metadata in the form property: value. This metadata section is terminated by an empty line (\n\n)

• To not include a folder in the menu, set index: false, as you will need for the news/ folder(!).

• To include a folder, set the title of the navigation bar with name: as well as its position with rank. Do not forget to set index: true explicitly.

If the parameter index does not exist, the corresponding folder will not appear in the navigation bar, although every folder containing a markdown file must contain an index.xx.md file.

The markdown files must have a header in the same fashion as the index files. A complete .md file can look like this:

title: Stuff
author: alice
date: 2015-03-27
glyphicon: glyphicon-user

### Stuff
#### Part 1

To do stuff, you have to do stuff first.

Another possibility is to include hyperlinks, which only have a metadata section:

title: Awesome page
glyphicon: glyphicon-tower
link: http://http://www.awesome-page.com/
rank: 1

Sipa is capable of parsing a json file to provide “dynamic” content, i.e. content which varies according to the dormitory selected.

For each content file, Sipa tries to open a file following the naming scheme <pagename>.<locale>.json. If it does not exist or does not contain valid json, this is ignored and no additional block is displayed on the webpage.

The file has to follow the format below:

{
    "title": "Financial data",
    "keys": {
        "beneficiary": "Beneficiary",
        "iban": "IBAN",
        "bank": "Bank",
        "bic": "BIC",
        "information": "Information"
    },
    "values": {
        "wu": {
            "beneficiary": "Studentenrat TUD - AG DSN",
            "bank": "Ostsächsische Sparkasse Dresden",
            "iban": "DE61850503003120219540",
            "bic": "OSDD DE 81 XXX",
            "information": "User-ID, Last Name, First Name, Dormitory / Room number"
        },
        "gerok": {
            "beneficiary": "Studentenrat TUD - AG DSN",
            "bank": "Ostsächsische Sparkasse Dresden",
            "iban": "To be investigated",
            "bic": "To be investigated",
            "information": "To be investigated"
        },
        "local": {
            "beneficiary": "Not available",
            "bank": "Not available",
            "iban": "Not available",
            "bic": "Not available",
            "information": "Not available"
        }
    },
    "mappings": {
        "wu": "wu",
        "zw": "wu",
        "borsi": "wu",
        "gerok": "gerok",
        "localhost": "local"
    }
}

Because information may or may not dependend on a data source, it can be grouped using mappings. Dormitories whose name is not specified in mappings will not appear in the select field on the web page, so be careful to keep the list complete.

The value of a mappings field has to correspond to a dataset in values.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sipa