Installation & Configuration

Before starting the deployment of our digital lab book, please make sure to read atleast this guide once to get an overview of the deployment process.

Prerequisites

Deployment of our digital lab book can be done via docker containers. The system(s) dedicated to running the platform should have Docker and Docker Compose installed. You can find the installation instructions for Docker and Docker Compose on the official Docker website.

To use all functionalities of the platform, you should also have a SMTP (email) server available. This is used to send out E-Mails for account verification and password reset.

Running the containers

We provide a docker-compose.yml file to run the platform in a containerized environment. You can find the file in the docker directory of the project. The file contains all necessary services to run the platform.

For example you might want to create a new directory and download the docker-compose.yml file into it and than start it as follows:

mkdir snip
wget https://gitlab.gwdg.de/irp/snip/-/raw/main/docker/docker-compose.yml
docker-compose up

Configuration

Configuration files are automatically generated on startup into the ./config folder. You may change the mount in the docker-compose.yml file to a different location if you want to store the configuration files in a different location.

Even though snip should come with reasonable defaults and randomly generated secrets, please check the configuration files in the ./config directory.

Environment Variables

Even thought most configuration options come in yaml format, there are some optional configuration options that need to need to be set via environment variables. You can set them in a .env file in the same directory as the docker-compose.yml file. The .env file is automatically loaded by Docker Compose.

Hostname and Port

As the services dont know on which port they are exposed to the internet and on which hostname they are running, you need to set the SNIP_HOSTNAME and SNIP_PORT environment variables. This is mainly used to generate the correct URLs for single sign on providers and for the email verification links. If you are currently just testing the platform, you can omit them.

For example using a .env file:

SNIP_HOSTNAME=snip.example.com
SNIP_PORT=443

Timezone

The timezone defaults to Europe/Berlin. You can change this by setting the TZ environment variable for all services in the docker-compose.yml file.

E.g. using a .env file:

TZ=America/New_York

Complete example `.env` file

SNIP_HOSTNAME=snip.example.com
SNIP_PORT=443
TZ=Europe/Berlin

SSL

By default we supply a self signed certificate for development and testing purposes. For production use, you should mount your certificates (certificate.crt and certificate.key) in the /ssl directory of the nginx container.

This should be done in the docker-compose.yml file like this:

services:
    nginx:
        container_name: snip_nginx
        image: docker.gitlab.gwdg.de/irp/snip/nginx:latest
        ports:
            - 443:443
        depends_on:
            - next
            - images
        volumes:
            - ./my_ssl_dir:/ssl
# ...other config