Using Kotti as a library

Kotti may be used as a library instead of as a framework. That is, instead of extending Kotti through hooks such as kotti.includes, your application may take full control and use Kotti in a more library-like fashion.

Using this approach it is well possible to use Kotti’s individual subsystems in a very customized application that has only little in common with Kotti’s own built-in CMS.

Kotti will need some initial set up though for some of its components to be able to work meaningfully. You’ll typically call kotti.base_configure from your code to take care of that:

default_settings = {
    'kotti.authn_policy_factory': 'myapp.authn_policy_factory',
    'kotti.base_includes': (
        'kotti kotti.views kotti.views.login kotti.views.users'),
    'kotti.includes': 'myapp myapp.views',
    'kotti.use_tables': 'orders principals',
    'kotti.populators': 'myapp.resources.populate',
    'kotti.principals_factory': 'myapp.security.Principals',
    'kotti.root_factory': 'myapp.resources.Root',
    'kotti.site_title': 'Myapp',
    }

def main(global_config, **settings):
    settings2 = default_settings.copy()
    settings2.update(settings)
    config = kotti.base_configure(global_config, **settings2)
    return config.make_wsgi_app()

The above example configures Kotti so that its user database and security subsystem are set up. Only a handful of tables (kotti.use_tables) and a handful of Kotti’s views (kotti.base_includes) are activated. Furthermore, our application is configured to use a custom root factory (root node) and a custom populator.

In your PasteDeploy configuration you’d then wire up your app directly, maybe like this:

[app:main]
use = egg:myapp
pyramid.includes = pyramid_tm
mail.default_sender = yourname@yourhost
sqlalchemy.url = sqlite:///%(here)s/myapp.db
kotti.secret = secret