BeakerHelpers

BeakerHelpers

BeakerHelpers is a Beaker_ extension that can show the active sessions and clean the old ones. Currently it only works with beaker.ext.database storage backend.

BeakerHelpers is also a namespace package so new plugins can be created under this namespace_.

You can find the Git repository at github.com_

Installation

easy_install_::

$ <env>/bin/easy_install BeakerHelpers

pip_::

$ <env>/bin/pip install BeakerHelpers

Get / Show Sessions Usage

You can call get_sessions to get a list of active sessions (dicts)::

>>> import sqlalchemy
>>> from beakerhelpers.sessions import get_sessions
>>> sessions_table = sqlalchemy.Table('beaker_cache',
...     sqlalchemy.MetaData('sqlite:///my.db'), autoload=True)
>>> get_sessions(sessions_table, timeout=3600)  # timeout in seconds
[{
    '_accessed_time': datetime.datetime(2010, 1, 1, 10, 10, 10),
    '_creation_time': datetime.datetime(2010, 1, 1, 08, 40, 00),
    'user_name': u'[e-mail]',
}]

The above form is suitable for Python access. If you want to provide this data to the user you could use show_sessions with the same parameters instead::

>>> print show_sessions(sessions_table, timeout=3600)
--------------------------------------------------------
     _accessed_time |      _creation_time |    user_name
--------------------------------------------------------
2010-01-01 10:10:10 | 2010-01-01 08:40:00 | [e-mail]

However you can use paster beakersessions to call the show_sessions from the console::

$ <env>/bin/paster beakersessions cfg/prod.ini
--------------------------------------------------------
     _accessed_time |      _creation_time |    user_name
--------------------------------------------------------
2010-01-01 10:10:10 | 2010-01-01 08:40:00 | [e-mail]

In this case the cfg/prod.ini file should be a paste.deploy loadable configuration file. BeakerHelpers expects to find these keys in the [app:main] section of cfg/prod.ini:

- ``beaker.session.type`` = `ext:database` - the only supported backend (yet)
- ``beaker.session.url`` - an `SQLAlchemy engine URL`_
- ``beaker.session.timeout`` - session timeout in seconds
- ``beaker.session.table_name`` - (optional) session storage table.
  According to beaker.ext.database_, defaults to `beaker_cache`.

paster beakersessions command also takes two optional arguments:

- ``--prefix, -p`` - beaker key prefix in the config file, defaults to
  `beaker.session`
- ``--timeout, -t`` - do not show sessions older than the timeout. Timeout
  examples:

  - `3s` - 3 seconds
  - `14m` - 14 minutes
  - `36h` - 36 hours
  - `2d` - 2 days
  - `0` - show all sessions (ignore timeout even in the config file)

  If not provided the timeout will be taken from the config file,
  `<prefix>.timeout` (seconds).

Session Cleanup Usage

You can use cleanup_sessions from your Python scripts to remove old sessions::

>>> import sqlalchemy
>>> from beakerhelpers.sessions import cleanup_sessions
>>> sessions_table = sqlalchemy.Table('beaker_cache',
...     sqlalchemy.MetaData('sqlite:///my.db'), autoload=True)
>>> cleanup_sessions(sessions_table, timeout=3600)  # timeout in seconds

The sessions older than 1 hour would get cleaned. However, session cleanup is particularly convenient to be called as a paste script::

$ <env>/bin/paster beakercleanup cfg/prod.ini

It expects the same config file structure and takes the same optional arguments as beakersessions. However, in this case sessions older than --timeout will be removed.

Attention - BeakerShowSessions and BeakerCleanup users

Due to namespace issues BeakerShowSessions and BeakerCleanup can not be installed with pip and/or easy_install. Their functionality got merged into this package and access became simpler. We strongly encourage to use BeakerHelpers instead.

.. _Beaker: http://beaker.groovie.org .. _beaker.ext.database: http://www.bitbucket.org/bbangert/beaker/src/554a46f4a946/beaker/ext/database.py#cl-35 .. _SQLAlchemy engine URL: http://www.sqlalchemy.org/docs/05/dbengine.html#create-engine-url-arguments .. _github.com: http://github.com/kaukas/BeakerHelpers .. _namespace: http://peak.telecommunity.com/DevCenter/setuptools#namespace-packages .. _easy_install: http://peak.telecommunity.com/DevCenter/EasyInstall .. _pip: http://pip.openplans.org/