Remote ActiveMath Authoring

This page documents how to set-up things so that one can create content on one machine and upload it to another which runs the ActiveMath. This effort is still at a relatively early stage.

Requirements

The instructions below have been tested on MacOSX and have many chances to work on Linux but may need tuning to work with Windows. It is supposed that your user is enabled to login over ssh into the host you want to run on without being asked for a password (i.e. using ssh key-pairs and the authorized_keys2 file) and that you can use the command rsync to copy things (or that you save on a directory that you can also mount on your laptop).

Configuration

We shall define two properties. These can be included anywhere where the build.xml of the collections read them; this includes the ContentDescr_xx file but is probably best put in a file called build.properties in your home directory. This properties-file is read by all collection-publication-scripts and is not required to be inside the collection as it should.

Let us suppose that you run the authoring environment within your personal laptop and that the ActiveMath server is at the machine nirvana run under the user user within directory amdir.

To use the upload facility, add the following line:

remoteAMsync = user@nirvana:amdir 
The publish script will invoke, then, rsync -av ./ user@nirvana:amdir/content/<collName> before requesting the MBase-reload task from the MBase interface. If you run your ActiveMath on another host, without tunnels, it must be talked to per http as such, you need to add:
amServerHost=nirvana
Or, if you are also changing ports (as can be done inside server.xml and ActiveMath-individual.properties) you may need to add:
omdocjdommbase.url = http://nirvana:55007/
activemathRootUrl = http://nirvana:55080/

Feedback welcome

I am currently considering an XML-RPC-based upload mechanism which would not require all the rsync and ssh fuss (known to be difficult). For this I am still looking at file-synchronization facilities… which could end-up be such as WebDAV facilities.