Configuration

Froide can be configured in many ways to reflect the needs of your local FoI portal.

All configuration is kept in the Django settings.py file. Individual settings can be overwritten by placing a local_settings.py file on the Python path (e.g. in the same directory) and redefining the configuration key in there.

Froide Configuration

There is a dictionary called FROIDE_CONFIG inside settings.py that acts as a namespace for some other configurations. These settings are also available in the template via the name froide through the context processor froide.helper.context_processors.froide.

The following keys in that dictionary must be present:

create_new_publicbody

boolean Are users allowed to create new public bodies when making a request by filling in some details? Newly created public bodies must be approved by an administrator before the request is sent.

publicbody_empty

boolean Can users leave the public body empty on a request, so other users can suggest an appropriate public body later?

users_can_hide_web

boolean Can users hide their name on the portal? Their name will always be sent with the request, but may not appear on the website.

public_body_officials_public

boolean Are the names of responding public body officials public and visible on the Web?

public_body_officials_email_public

boolean Are the email addresses of public body officials public and visible on the Web?

currency

string The currency in which payments (if at all) occur

default_law

integer The id of the Freedom of Information law in the database that is used by default (e.g. 1)

Greeting Regexes

To detect names and beginning and endings of letters the standard settings define a list of common English letter greeting and closing regexes that also find the name:

import re
rec = re.compile
# define your greetings and closing regexes
POSSIBLE_GREETINGS = [rec(u"Dear (?:Mr\.?|Ms\.? .*?)")]
POSSIE_CLOSINGS = [rec(u"Sincerely yours,?")]

You should replace this with a list of the most common expressions in your language.

Index Boosting of Public Bodies

Some Public Bodies are more important and should appear first in searches (if their name and description match the search terms). You can provide a mapping of public body classifications (e.g. ministry, council etc.) to their search boost factor via the FROIDE_PUBLIC_BODY_BOOSTS setting:

# boost public bodies by their classification
FROIDE_PUBLIC_BODY_BOOSTS = {
    u"Ministry": 1.9,
    u"Council": 0.8
}

Settings for Sending E-Mail

You must adapt the standard Django parameters for sending email. Configure the backend depending on your environment (development vs. production):

# development environment:
EMAIL_BACKEND = 'django.core.mail.backends.console.EmailBackend'
# production environment:
EMAIL_BACKEND = 'djcelery_email.backends.CeleryEmailBackend'

Define the standard Django SMTP parameters for sending regular email notifications (not FoI request emails to public bodies):

EMAIL_HOST = "smtp.example.com"
EMAIL_PORT = 587
EMAIL_HOST_USER = "mail@foi.example.com"
EMAIL_HOST_PASSWORD = "password"
EMAIL_USE_TLS = True

Also define the parameters for sending FoI-Mails to public bodies. They might be different because they can either be sent from a fixed address and with a special Reply-To field or directly from a special address:

# Sends mail from a fixed from address with Reply-To field
FOI_EMAIL_FIXED_FROM_ADDRESS = True
FOI_EMAIL_HOST_USER = "foirelay@foi.example.com"
FOI_EMAIL_HOST_PASSWORD = "password"
FOI_EMAIL_HOST = "smtp.example.com"
FOI_EMAIL_PORT = 537
FOI_EMAIL_USE_TLS = True

Finally give the IMAP settings of the account that receives all FoI email. This account is polled regularly and the messages are processed and displayed on the website if their To field matches:

FOI_EMAIL_DOMAIN = "foi.example.com"
FOI_EMAIL_PORT_IMAP = 993
FOI_EMAIL_HOST_IMAP = "imap.example.com"
FOI_EMAIL_ACCOUNT_NAME = "foirelay@foi.example.com"
FOI_EMAIL_ACCOUNT_PASSWORD = "password"

Public Body E-Mail Dry-run

You can set your site up and test it out in a production environment while sending public body emails not to the public bodies but to another mail server. Use the following settings:

FROIDE_DRYRUN = True
FROIDE_DRYRUN_DOMAIN = "mymail.example.com"

This converts public body email addresses from

public-body@example.com

to

public-body+example.com@mymail.example.com

right before the mail is sent out (the changed address is not stored). This allows for some testing of sending and receiving mails to and from public bodies wihtout spamming them.

Setting Up Search with Solr

Froide uses django-haystack to interface with a search. Solr is recommended, but thanks to django-haystack you can use something else as well.

Haystack configuration for solr works like so:

HAYSTACK_SITECONF = 'froide.search_sites'
HAYSTACK_SEARCH_ENGINE = 'solr'
HAYSTACK_SOLR_URL = 'http://127.0.0.1:8983/solr'

If you have a solr multicore setup, your solr URL would probably look more like this:

HAYSTACK_SOLR_URL = 'http://127.0.0.1:8983/solr/froide'

For details, please refer to the Haystack Documentation.

Setting Up Background Processing with Celery

The following part in settings.py does the configuration of Celery. Overwrite the CELERY* values with your own in local_settings.py:

import djcelery
djcelery.setup_loader()

CELERY_IMPORTS = ("foirequest.tasks", )

CELERY_RESULT_BACKEND = "database"
CELERY_RESULT_DBURI = "sqlite:///dev.db"

CELERYBEAT_SCHEDULER = "djcelery.schedulers.DatabaseScheduler"

For details please refer to the django-celery documentation.

Some more settings

Configure the name and default domain URL (without trailing slash) of your site with the following settings:

SITE_NAME = 'FroIde'
SITE_URL = 'http://localhost:8000'

You can give a URL with string formatting placeholders query and domain in them that will be presented to the user as the URL for web searches via the setting SEARCH_ENGINE_QUERY. The default is a Google search.

Securing your site

It may be a good idea to NOT use easily guessable URL paths for specific parts of the site, specifically the admin. To make these parts configurable by local_settings you can use the following setting:

SECRET_URLS = {
    "admin": "my-secret-admin",
    "sentry": "my-secret-sentry"
}

It’s also recommended to protect the admin and sentry further via HTTP auth in your production reverse proxy (e.g. nginx).

The app djangosecure is part of Froide and it is highly recommended to deploy the site with SSL (get a free SSL certificate from StartSSL).

Some Django settings related to security and SSL:

CSRF_COOKIE_SECURE = True
CSRF_FAILURE_VIEW = 'froide.account.views.csrf_failure'

SESSION_COOKIE_AGE = 3628800 # six weeks for usability
SESSION_COOKIE_HTTPONLY = True
SESSION_COOKIE_SECURE = True