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The Evolution of Finger: configuration and packaging of the finger service
==========================================================================






Introduction
------------



This is the eleventh part of the Twisted tutorial :doc:`Twisted from Scratch, or The Evolution of Finger <index>` .




In this part, we make it easier for non-programmers to configure a finger
server and show how to package it in the .deb and RPM package formats. Plugins
are discussed further in the :doc:`Twisted Plugin System <../plugin>` 
howto. Writing twistd plugins is covered in :doc:`Writing a twistd Plugin <../tap>` , and .tac applications are covered in :doc:`Using the Twisted Application Framework <../application>` .





Plugins
-------



So far, the user had to be somewhat of a programmer to be able to configure
stuff. Maybe we can eliminate even that? Move old code
to ``finger/__init__.py`` and...




Full source code for finger module here: 

:download:`finger.py <listings/finger/finger/finger.py>`

.. literalinclude:: listings/finger/finger/finger.py







:download:`tap.py <listings/finger/finger/tap.py>`

.. literalinclude:: listings/finger/finger/tap.py


And register it all:





:download:`finger_tutorial.py <listings/finger/twisted/plugins/finger_tutorial.py>`

.. literalinclude:: listings/finger/twisted/plugins/finger_tutorial.py


Note that the second argument to :api:`twisted.application.service.ServiceMaker <ServiceMaker>` ,``finger.tap`` , is a reference to a module
(``finger/tap.py`` ), not to a filename.




And now, the following works





.. code-block:: console

    
    % sudo twistd -n finger --file=/etc/users --ircnick=fingerbot





For more details about this, see the :doc:`twistd plugin documentation <../tap>` .





OS Integration
--------------



If we already have the "finger" package installed in
``PYTHONPATH`` (e.g.  we added it to ``site-packages`` ), we
can achieve easy integration:





Debian
~~~~~~




.. code-block:: console

    
    % tap2deb --unsigned -m "Foo <foo@example.com>" --type=python finger.tac
    % sudo dpkg -i .build/*.deb





Red Hat / Mandrake
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~




.. code-block:: console

    
    % tap2rpm --type=python finger.tac
    % sudo rpm -i *.rpm




These packages will properly install and register ``init.d`` 
scripts, etc. for the given file.




If it doesn't work on your favorite OS: patches accepted!