Running Mathics on your server

This guide descrbes how to setup Mathics on a local network. There are additional (security) considerations for running Mathics on a publically facing webserver.

Best practises for a local network

• Install PyPy

sudo apt-get install pypy

• Install Setuptools

curl -O http://peak.telecommunity.com/dist/ez_setup.py
pypy ez_setup.py

• Download and Install Mathics

curl -L  -O https://github.com/mathics/Mathics/releases/download/v0.8/mathics-0.8.tar.gz`
tar xzf mathics-0.8.tar.gz
cd mathics-0.8/
sudo pypy setup.py install

You can now run the web server with mathicsserver -e but you probably want to make some changes first.

• disable the files module by setting ENABLE_FILES_MODULE = False in mathics/settings.py (otherwise remote users will be able to read and write local files).
• set an execution timeout in mathics/setttings.py, e.g. TIMEOUT = 10 for a 10s limit.
• Various other changes in the settings.py file like email addresses.

You probably also want to run the server as a restricted user within a jail shell

Running Mathics on a public webserver

Warning: You should be very careful running Mathics publicly, there are some potentially large security implications to be aware of!

The setup is similar but you can use ngnix to cache the static content. Mathics runs as a wsgi app so you can use uwsgi. The Django docs are a good reference.