How to Configure a List of Allowed File Types for Article Attachments

Alation Cloud Service Applies to Alation Cloud Service instances of Alation

Customer Managed Applies to customer-managed instances of Alation

This procedure requires server-side access to the Alation application.

Note

Alation Cloud Service customers can request server configuration changes through Alation Support.

Note

Document Hubs don’t support attachments.

In the alation_conf, there are two parameters that can be used to whitelist or blacklist file types that users may try to upload as attachments to Article objects.

  • alation.security.whitelisted_file_extensions lists the allowed file types

  • alation.security.blacklisted_file_extensions lists the file types that are not permitted as attachments

File types in the whitelist are allowed as attachments to article objects in Alation. File types in the blacklist are not allowed. A user trying to upload a blacklisted file type will see a warning message in Alation.

To change the lists,

  1. SSH to the Alation server.

  2. To view the current values:

    sudo /etc/init.d/alation shell
alation_conf alation.security.whitelisted_file_extensions

This will output the current parameter settings. For example:

../../_images/VR7_whitelist.png

  1. To add a value to the list, append your value to the list of available values and deploy the updated list. To remove a value, remove it from the list and apply the remaining list. Note that there should be no spaces between values:

alation_conf alation.security.whitelisted_file_extensions -s ['pdf','jpeg',
'jpg','png','pptx','docx','xls','xml','ppt','gif','xlsx','bmp','doc','rtf',
'gz','zip','mp4','mp3','wmv','tiff']

Changes will be applied without a restart.