Removing a Public Facing User Page in OS X Server Wiki

January 9, 2015 | apple | devops |

OS X Server has some pretty neat tools that are easy to set up and use for a team collaboration. The problem is that some of these tools are a bit quirky, especially when it comes to removing users or making sure that no data is accessible from the outside world. For example, if you edit your user profile page, this change will be visible to the public world. There is no real way (that I can find) to hide it, so it is a little bit annoying. Even removing the user from the wiki does not fix this. After doing some digging, it looks like all of this is controlled by a PostgreSQL database which makes it nice to try to figure out how to get rid of these pages. You can log into the PostgreSQL database on OS X server by opening up a terminal and running sudo -u _postgres psql template1 You can list all of the available databases by running \listand you should see one called collab. Connect to collab so that you can view the data inside and make some changes by running \c collab You can see the entire scheme by running \dt and it will look something like this:

:                   List of relations  Schema |            Name             | Type  | Owner --------+-----------------------------+-------+--------  public | blog_entity                 | table | collab  public | document_entity             | table | collab  public | entity                      | table | collab  public | entity_acls                 | table | collab  public | entity_acls_defaults        | table | collab  public | entity_attrs                | table | collab  public | entity_changesets           | table | collab  public | entity_comment              | table | collab  public | entity_lock                 | table | collab  public | entity_preview              | table | collab  public | entity_private_attrs        | table | collab  public | entity_tag                  | table | collab  public | entity_type                 | table | collab  public | file_entity                 | table | collab  public | filedata_entity             | table | collab  public | filename_reservation        | table | collab  public | global_settings             | table | collab  public | groups                      | table | collab  public | migration_entity            | table | collab  public | migration_status            | table | collab  public | migrationplaceholder_entity | table | collab  public | notification                | table | collab  public | page_entity                 | table | collab  public | podcast_entity              | table | collab  public | podcast_episode_entity      | table | collab  public | preview_queue               | table | collab  public | project_entity              | table | collab  public | relationship                | table | collab  public | savedquery_entity           | table | collab  public | search_index                | table | collab  public | search_stat                 | table | collab  public | session                     | table | collab  public | subscription                | table | collab

The schema is pretty complicated and has some really interesting relationships. My first thought was to just remove all instances of a user, but this turned out to be very complex because pretty much all of these tables depend on each other. The best way to remove a page is to fake the application out by marking the item as “deleted” in the entity table. For example, you can find the entity that you want to hide by running:

 select * from entity where long_name like 'Lev%';

This will show us all of the things that I have done in the wiki. Find the specific thing that you want. If you are looking for a user Profile page, this has the entity_type_fk of com.apple.entity.Page. You can grab the uid of this item from the first column and then run a simple update statement to mark the item as deleted.

update entity set is_deleted = 't' where uid = 'YOUR UID';

This item will no longer show up in the UI and you can have a truly “private” wiki again. The data model is pretty interesting and is worth looking at if you have nothing to do.

Thank you for reading! Share your thoughts with me on bluesky, mastodon, or via email.

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