Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)

How do I protect the gallery with a password?

Sigal simply generates HTML pages, there is no server process that could handle a password protection. So the password has to be handled in your web server (Apache, Nginx, etc). A complete treatise on webserver configuration is beyond the scope of this document, but, for example, you may get started with Apache with the official documentation.

Here is an example Apache configuration, assuming your gallery was built in /var/www/sigal/_build:

<Directory /var/www/sigal/_build>
    AuthType Basic
    AuthName "Restricted Content"
    AuthUserFile /etc/apache2/htpasswd
    Require valid-user
</Directory>

You will then need to create username/password combinations in the /etc/apache2/htpasswd using the htpasswd command.

How do I protect only some folders of the gallery with a password?

This is more complicated than the above. Assuming you want to protect only the foo/ subdirectory, the following will unfortunately not do what you expect:

<Directory /var/www/sigal/_build/foo>
    AuthType Basic
    AuthName "Restricted Content"
    AuthUserFile /etc/apache2/htpasswd
    Require valid-user
</Directory>

It will protect the folder with a password, but, because of the thumbnails shown on the main page, the web browser will prompt the user for a password on the parent directory as well, which will confuse users and is probably not what you want.

The trick is then to whitelist the thumbnail files. Here we’ll assume you will name the thumbnail files public.jpg and then configure those files to be visible even in the private section, like so:

<Directory /var/www/sigal/_build/foo>
    AuthType Basic
    AuthName "Restricted Content"
    AuthUserFile /etc/apache2/htpasswd
    Require valid-user
</Directory>

<Files "public.jpg">
    Satisfy any
</Files>

Then just make sure, through the album information mechanism, that the right image is chosen as a thumbnail for that album, for example, in foo/index.md:

Title: Private section
Thumbnail: public.jpg

Et voilà! You now have a hybrid private/public gallery. This is not recommended for highly sensitive pictures; because other parts of Sigal may (eventually?) leak information about filenames, thumbnails or even contents without your knowledge in the future. But it’s a good simple way to add basic snooping protection over certain areas with minimal configuration.

How to regenerate the gallery when something changes ?

It can be convenient to build continuously the gallery when adding or removing pictures in the albums, however Sigal does not provide currently a buitin “autoreload” feature. This can be achieved with external tool like peat:

peat --dynamic 'find pictures/' 'sigal build'

will watch changes inside the pictures/ directory and rebuild the gallery in this case. Many other tools do similar things, here is the equivalent command with entr:

while true; do  find pictures/ | entr -d sigal build; done

How to automatically build the gallery on a remote git server?

Another way to handle this is by storing your files on a remote git repository, optionally with git-annex or git-lfs to avoid managing large image files directly with git.

Then Sigal can be triggered using git hook to update the repository on push. The hook can be as simple as this:

#!/bin/sh
sigal build

But a more robust implementation is also available. The hook should be installed in .git/hooks/post-receive. If you are using git-annex, this hook will already be present, so you’ll need to add the sigal hook at the end of the file, like so:

#!/bin/sh
# automatically configured by git-annex
git annex post-receive

/home/foo/src/git-hooks/sigal-git-hook

This assumes, of course, that you are running your own Git server; this will not work with commercial providers like GitHub or GitLab unless you setup a periodic job to automatically pull from those server, in which case the above hook would be installed as an update hook.