REST server

Mailman exposes a REST HTTP server for administrative control.

The server listens for connections on a configurable host name and port.

It is always protected by HTTP basic authentication using a single global user name and password. The credentials are set in the [webservice] section of the configuration using the admin_user and admin_pass properties.

Because the REST server has full administrative access, it should always be run only on localhost, unless you really know what you’re doing. In addition you should set the user name and password to secure values and distribute them to any REST clients with reasonable precautions.

The Mailman major and minor version numbers are in the URL.

Credentials

When the Authorization header contains the proper credentials, the request succeeds.

>>> from httplib2 import Http
>>> headers = {
...     'Content-Type': 'application/x-www-form-urlencode',
...     'Authorization': 'Basic cmVzdGFkbWluOnJlc3RwYXNz',
...     }
>>> url = 'http://localhost:9001/3.0/system/versions'
>>> response, content = Http().request(url, 'GET', None, headers)
>>> print(response.status)
200

Version information

System version information can be retrieved from the server, in the form of a JSON encoded response.

>>> dump_json('http://localhost:9001/3.0/system/versions')
http_etag: "..."
mailman_version: GNU Mailman 3.0... (...)
python_version: ...
self_link: http://localhost:9001/3.0/system/versions