Getting Started

Memento TimeGate

TimeGate is a WSGI application server that allows simple implementation of Memento capabilities for web resources having accessible revisions. It manages all the content negotiation logic, from request processing, best memento query and selection to HTTP response.

To make web resources that is accessible on a web server fully Memento compliant, two things need to be done.

• TimeGate is generic: a custom handler must be plugged in to match the specific web server.
• The Memento framework uses specific HTTP headers: they must be added to the resource's web server responses.

Steps

The big picture

The first thing to do is to understand how the program is structured.

Installing the server

The code can be obtained here. Download a zip or tar.gz archive into a directory of your choice.

Decompress the zip files using:

$ unzip timegate-<version>.zip

Decompress tar.gz files using:

$ tar xvzf timegate-<version>.tar.gz

Install the dependencies using:

$ echo 'uWSGI>=2.0.3 ConfigParser>=3.3.0r2 python-dateutil>=2.1 requests>=2.2.1 werkzeug>=0.9.6 lxml>=3.4.1' | xargs pip install

Running the TimeGate

Then try starting the TimeGate server with one of the handler that is already provided. To run it, first navigate to the directory:

$ cd timegate-<version>

Then, there are two possibilities:

• Either execute uwsgi --http :9999 --wsgi-file core/application.py --master to deploy the TimeGate on localhost:9999. Add the option --pidfile /path/to/file.pid to store the process ID in a file.
• Or edit the uWSGI launch configuration in conf/timegate.ini and then execute uwsgi conf/timegate.ini

To stop the server:

• Simply use CTRL+C if it is running in foreground.
• Or execute uwsgi --stop /path/to/file.pid if you have stored the PID to run it in the background.
• If by mistake the PID is not stored but the TimeGate is still running, list all uwsgi processes using ps ux | grep uwsgi, identify the TimeGate process from the COMMAND column and kill it using kill -INT <PID>.

Handler

Once the server is successfully running with an example handler that was provided, edit it or create a new one that returns the list of all URI-Ms given a URI-R of an Original Resource you wish to make Memento compliant.

Memento Headers

The Memento protocol mainly works with HTTP headers. Now add the required headers to your web server's HTTP responses.

Configuring the TimeGate

Finally, enter the TimeGate's HOST location in the config.ini file. Also edit the other parameters' default values to your preferences.

Memento compliance

That's it. The basic Memento functionalities are here and your web server is now Memento compliant. See the wiki page for advanced features.