Definition/use of servername problematic

[sjpb]

(firstly, thanks for OOD and this role!)

The definition and use of servername is a bit problematic when NOT accessing the OOD node by IP, i.e so we don't want name-based virtual hosting:

• Default here is to define something (localhost)
• The templating here includes the ServerName directive (?) if servername is defined.

Firstly, I think the role var should be e.g. ood_servername to make it more obvious what it's setting, could refer to loads of things and at least that'd let you look up the OOD docs.

Secondly, I think the templating of SeverName should be conditional on it being both defined AND truth-y. The problem is that with more complicated inventory setups it can get impossible to un-define the variable again. I can give a specific example but it'll seem odd but I think in general having to have variables undefined to get specific behaviour is problematic.

[sjpb]

Having remembered that ansible's "truthy" is not very intuitive I had a play - what I mean is that I think the templating would be better as:

{% if ood_servername is defined and ood_servername %}
  ServerName {{ servername }}
{% endif %}

That way you can explicitly set ood_servername: '' to turn off writing ServerName.

[johrstrom]

Thanks for the reminder. Templates are being deprecated in #128. At some point we're going to stop supporting them and folks should just use the ood_portal_generator as it's more stable now with debian and is more maintainable from this repos standpoint.

To the variable, are you saying the default should actually be null/empty and not localhost?

[sjpb]

Re. templates - I think I am using the portal generator, at least I think I see it running in the ansible - isn't my first link the template the portal generator uses?? If not, how would I set servername once #128 is done?

Re. the variable. I have no familiarity with name-based virtual hosting so I don't know if the default of localhost makes sense generally. What I know is that accessing my ondemand server through a (proxied, private) IP address rather than a host+domain URL I had to set it to null/empty to remote that ServerName directive and get it to work - otherwise the openondemand virtual server never "saw" the request (probably wrong terminology!)