How to create site in share programmatically?

Question

This topic has been up quite some times in the community (forums, blog posts etc) and the conclusion is that this should be done making a REST Post call to share and the url /service/modules/create-site

The reason is that some surf specific stuff like the site dashboard are created from the share side.

However, I have been trying this approach from different angles all day, always ending up with a HTTP 200 in the response and no share site created. Quite frustrating.

I'm running this on Alfresco Enterprise 4.2.3.3 (I suspect my problems is due to a recent change)

To strip this down to something that is easy to reproduce, I'm following Martin Bergljungs blog post on the subject (http://www.ixxus.com/blog201203creating-alfresco-share-sites-javascript/), starting with using curl like this:

• create a text file with login credentials (login.txt) with the following content (change to appropriate values): username=admin&password=admin

• create a text file with the json to create a site (site_data.json) {"visibility" : "PUBLIC","title" : "My Test Site","shortName" : "mytestsite", "description" : "My Test Site created from command line", "sitePreset" : "site-dashboard"}

• Get the JSESSIONID by requesting a ticket: curl -v -d @login.txt -H "Content-Type:application/x-www-form-urlencoded" http://localhost:8081/share/page/dologin

• copy the resulting JSESSIONID value into the following curl call: curl -v -d @site_data.json -H "Cookie:JSESSIONID=<insert your jsessionid>" -H "Content-Type:application/json" -H "Accept:application/json" http://localhost:8081/share/service/modules/create-site

output from curl:

* Hostname was NOT found in DNS cache
* Trying 127.0.0.1...
* Connected to localhost (127.0.0.1) port 8081 (#0)
> POST /share/service/modules/create-site HTTP/1.1
> User-Agent: curl/7.35.0
> Host: localhost:8081
> Cookie:JSESSIONID=5963B948684F562A278909AF466D2306
> Content-Type:application/json
> Accept:application/json
> Content-Length: 196
> 
* upload completely sent off: 196 out of 196 bytes
< HTTP/1.1 200 OK
* Server Apache-Coyote/1.1 is not blacklisted
< Server: Apache-Coyote/1.1
< X-Frame-Options: SAMEORIGIN
< X-XSS-Protection: 1; mode=block
< X-Content-Type-Options: nosniff
< Content-Language: en-US
< Content-Length: 0
< Date: Tue, 02 Dec 2014 13:57:02 GMT
< 
* Connection #0 to host localhost left intact

The latter curl call results in a HTTP 200 as seen above, but a login to share reveals there have been no site created what so ever :(

BTW. I have disabled the CSRF Token Filter.

UPDATE: I have verified that the above approach works to create a site on Alfresco Enterprise 4.1.5 I have verified that it also fails on Alfresco Community 4.2.e This is reported as a bug: https://issues.alfresco.com/jira/browse/MNT-11706

UPDATE: Since the question was not clear to a reader I have reformulated it now

UPDATE:

Following Dave Websters answer, I been trying again using the following steps, still with CSRF Token disabled:

Login: curl -v -d @login.txt -H "Content-Type:application/x-www-form-urlencoded" http://localhost:8081/share/page/dologin

Response:

POST /share/page/dologin HTTP/1.1 User-Agent: curl/7.35.0 Host: localhost:8081 Accept: / Content-Type:application/x-www-form-urlencoded Content-Length: 29

* upload completely sent off: 29 out of 29 bytes
< HTTP/1.1 302 Found
* Server Apache-Coyote/1.1 is not blacklisted
< Server: Apache-Coyote/1.1
< X-Frame-Options: SAMEORIGIN
< X-XSS-Protection: 1; mode=block
< X-Content-Type-Options: nosniff
< Set-Cookie: JSESSIONID=058A52486E4EB12F94D1F95302732616; Path=/share/; HttpOnly
< Set-Cookie: alfLogin=1417618589; Expires=Wed, 10-Dec-2014 14:56:29 GMT; Path=/share
< Set-Cookie: alfUsername3=admin; Expires=Wed, 10-Dec-2014 14:56:29 GMT; Path=/share
< Location: http://localhost:8081/share
< Content-Length: 0
< Date: Wed, 03 Dec 2014 14:56:29 GMT

Took the cookie values and inserted into Daves code (with the csrf-stuff stripped out):

curl 'http://localhost:8081/share/service/modules/create-site' -H 'Cookie: JSESSIONID=058A52486E4EB12F94D1F95302732616; alfLogin=1417618589; alfUsername3=admin;' -H 'Origin: http://localhost:8081' -H 'Accept-Encoding: gzip,deflate,sdch' -H 'Accept-Language: en-US,en;q=0.8' -H 'User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_9_1) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/32.0.1700.107 Safari/537.36' -H 'Content-Type: application/json' -H 'Accept: */*' -H 'Referer: http://localhost:8081/share/page/site/erik/dashboard' -H 'X-Requested-With: application/json' -H 'Connection: keep-alive' --data-binary $'{"visibility":"PUBLIC","title":"erik'","shortName":"erik'","description":"This site is auto generated","sitePreset":"site-dashboard"}' --compressed

Still no share site generated though, and still a HTTP 200 Response. No errors in the logs either. This is driving me nuts :(

New Update (It works!):

I have now found out that you will need to "touch" a share webscript after making the login call before calling create-site with a post. I do this by making a get request in between. This somehow needs to be done to initialize the share session.

Answer 1

This is the curl command I use to generate sites programatically. I insert the JSESSIONID, LOGINCOOKIECONTENTS and CSRFTOKEN (twice) contents manually, but getting them programatically should work.

curl 'http://localhost:8081/share/service/modules/create-site' -H 'Cookie: JSESSIONID={JSESSIONID}; alfLogin={LOGINCOOKIECONTENTS}; alfUsername3=admin; Alfresco-CSRFToken={CSRFTOKEN};' -H 'Origin: http://localhost:8081' -H 'Accept-Encoding: gzip,deflate,sdch' -H 'Accept-Language: en-US,en;q=0.8' -H 'User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_9_1) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/32.0.1700.107 Safari/537.36' -H 'Content-Type: application/json' -H 'Accept: */*' -H 'Referer: http://localhost:8081/share/page/site/auto-gen-0/dashboard' -H 'X-Requested-With: application/json' -H 'Connection: keep-alive' -H 'Alfresco-CSRFToken: {CSRFTOKEN}' --data-binary $'{"visibility":"PUBLIC","title":"auto-gen'$I'","shortName":"auto-gen-'$I'","description":"This site is auto generated","sitePreset":"site-dashboard"}' --compressed

The expected response is:

{
   "success": true
}