Zoner - A DNS zone management UI

Overview

Zoner is a web application to make management of DNS zone files simple and easy. The authoritative copy of each domain remains in the original zone file, which Zoner reads & writes as needed, as opposed to storing domain details in a database. This means that zone files can still be edited manually and Zoner will pick up the changes as necessary.

Zoner features:

Domain details remain in original zone files, not in a database.
Zoner reads & writes actual zone files, which can also be safely modified outside of Zoner.
Zone serial numbers are incremented automatically when changes are made.
Zoner can signal bind to reload a zone, via rndc.
An audit of all zone changes is maintained for each domain. Any previous version of a zone file can be inspected and zones can be rolled back to any previous version.

Requirements:

Zoner is a Python application built with the TurboGears framework. Both Python and TurboGears (version 1.x) are required.
Zoner requires the easyzone and dnspython Python packages for DNS/zone management.
Zoner also requires SQLAlchemy, TGBooleanFormWidget and TGExpandingFormWidget Python packages.

(All dependencies should be installed automatically if using setuptools, which will usually be the case for a properly installed TurboGears environment.)

Installation

The easiest way to install Zoner is by using setuptools:

$ easy_install zoner

Alternatively, install TurboGears then download the Zoner package from http://pypi.python.org/pypi/zoner/ and install with:

$ python setup.py install

Create a config file. A template sample-prod.cfg file is included with the package (or installed alongside the package). Example:

$ cp /usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages/zoner-1.3.1-py2.4.egg/config/sample-prod.cfg zoner.cfg

Customise the config file, then initialise the database:

$ tg-admin sql create

Next, create a user to login to the Zoner application with:

$ zoner_users -c zoner.cfg add

Finally, start the Zoner application:

$ zoner zoner.cfg

Point your browser at http://localhost:8080/ (or the appropriate host/port as per your configuration) and you should be able to login.

Apache Proxy

It is a common requirement to proxy this application behind an Apache hosted secure address. For example, let's say this application is listening locally on http://127.0.0.1:8080/ and Apache needs to proxy all requests to it from https://my.host.name/zoner/

Here is a sample of the Apache configuration (excluding all the directives not relevant to this example):

<VirtualHost _default_:443>
  #### Proxy Requests to Zoner under /zoner/
  ProxyRequests Off
  ProxyPass /zoner/ http://127.0.0.1:8080/
  ProxyPassReverse /zoner/ http://127.0.0.1:8080/
</VirtualHost>

In your application config (dev.cfg or prod.cfg) you will want to add the following:

[global]
server.webpath="/zoner"

That should be all that is required.