User Data

User data is stored in directory data/user in files that have the user id as filename (there can be additional files for a user with some other appendix like .trail).

To speed up processing, moin may also generate some data structures that get saved to disk as *.pickle file - these are internal data structures and you must not edit those files. If you are in doubt whether such a *.pickle file is correct or up-to-date, then just delete it and it will be re-generated automatically by moin. If you run a persistent (non-cgi) moin, maybe better restart moin after deleting the pickle.

Accessing User Data

To peek into a user's data:

  1. Become root, or whatever user is allowed to access the user files.

  2. Go to the data/user directory, where the user files are.

  3. grep UserName * (grep Name= *) in new version

That'll give you some file names containing that username. The file names have the form ##########.##.##### (the user id).

Now the file itself is just a long string of "key=value". cat the file to check it out.

Logging in by the UID

Note that, if you have a UID, you can log in as that user:

/!\ This is a deprecated feature and was removed in moin 1.5.0. Make sure you have a unique user name, a password and a valid email address set!

Removing / disabling a user account

You can remove a user by deleting his user file (and other files that are named with that userid prefix).

Be aware that if you do that, you will destroy the edit history of that user. Moin won't be able to show this user in page history, because this user id will then be unknown.

So better disable an account rather than removing it. Just edit the user file and set disabled=1.

It also is a good idea to change the user name and email when disabling it - just append -disabled<date> to avoid trouble with duplicate names/emails if somebody else wants to create an account with the same name.

User cache

After user data is deleted, moin may still think the user exists due to the user cache in data/cache/user/name2id. Deleting this file purges the cache and should fix this problem.

MoinMoin: UserData (last edited 2007-10-29 19:10:04 by localhost)