Doing production installs

Indeed. For me, the classic has to be Larry Wall's original Perl config script, which was very chatty. Long ago, it used to mutter things like:

Hmm, this looks ilke a System V system,...
Congratulations, you aren't running Eunice!
...
Perl comes with no warranty. If it breaks, you get to keep both pieces.

There were people who actually re-ran the (lengthy) configure step because the darn thing was that funny.

Back on topic...

The overwhelming majority of what I (seem to) need to do is going to require SQL-level updates in any case. Perhaps I'm fighting city hall, and I should just consider doing all of the preconfiguration somewhere else and preloading the database. I don't really want to do that, because it isn't real robust against version updates.

Let me try the hack of using elinks to poll drupal. Looking at the initialization script, it does appear that doing that might work.

What a kludge!

The following, thoroughly disgusting bit of python code did the trick:

#!/usr/bin/python
import sys
import urllib2
import urllib

from urllib2 import build_opener, HTTPCookieProcessor, Request
from urllib import urlencode

opener = build_opener(HTTPCookieProcessor)

def urlopen2(url, data=None, user_agent='urlopen2'): 
     """Can be used to retrieve cookie-enabled Web pages (when 'data' is
     None) and to post Web forms (when 'data' is a list, tuple or dictionary
     containing the parameters of the form).
     """
     if hasattr(data, "__iter__"):
          data = urllib.urlencode(data)
     headers = {'User-Agent' : user_agent}
     return opener.open(urllib2.Request(url, data, headers))

print "Initializing to %s://%s:%s@localhost/%s" % (sys.argv[1], sys.argv[2], sys.argv[3], sys.argv[4])

reply = dict(db_type=sys.argv[1],
             db_path=sys.argv[2],
             db_user=sys.argv[3],
             db_pass=sys.argv[4],
             op="Save Configuration",
             form_id="install_settings_form")

#print urlencode(reply)

urlopen2("http://localhost/drupal/install.php?profile=default", reply)

It is invoked as

initdrupal.py mysql dbname user password

Just goes to show that what can be done by one programmer can be reversed by another.

Obviously, this can be improved on quite a bit, but it isn't a bad start.

-- shap (who is old enough to remember rogue-o-matic and sesruc)