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.

Check out some more stuff to read down below.

Most popular posts this month

Recent Favorite Blog Posts

This is a collection of the last 8 posts that I bookmarked.

Underused Techniques for Effective Emails from Refactoring English
Death by a thousand slops from daniel.haxx.se
The AGI economy is coming faster than you think from Freethink
Rolling the ladder up behind us from Xe Iaso's blog
In Praise of “Normal” Engineers from charity.wtf
Reports of Bluesky's death have been greatly exaggerated from The Torment Nexus
What Would a Kubernetes 2.0 Look Like from matduggan.com
We Can Just Measure Things from Armin Ronacher's Thoughts and Writings

Articles from blogs I follow around the net

One Year of Lifting Weights

We visited Portugal last year. I still remember how heavy the luggage felt that we had with us: 2 suitcases, weighing around 20 kg each. One year later, I now joke about that, and laugh, whenever I tell anyone about it. I didn’t think much of it at the tim…

via ttntm.me - Blog August 1, 2025

Secret Cinema - Grease

I was lucky enough to score tickets to last-night's dress rehearsal. It would be unfair to review this like a completed show, instead this is a preview on what to expect and some thoughts on the "immersive" genre. Very mild spoilers ahead. …

via Terence Eden’s Blog August 1, 2025

P&B: Emma Goto

This is the 101st edition of People and Blogs, the series where I ask interesting people to talk about themselves and their blogs. Today we have Emma Goto and her blog, emgoto.com To follow this series subscribe to the newsletter. A new int…

via Manuel Moreale August 1, 2025

Generated by openring