Running RSpace on Docker
Running RSpace using Docker
For RSpace versions 1.69 and higher, it is possible to run RSpace using Docker. This greatly simplifies installation and enables a running, fully featured RSpace in a few minutes.
Running RSpace on Docker is useful for the following cases:
- RSpace Enterprise Edition customers' engineers who are working with the RSpace API, but who do not have access to an institutional RSpace test instance to try your applications / scripts / integrations against.
- Potential customers who want to evaluate RSpace on-premises and want to get started easily and quickly.
- Potential customers working exclusively in Windows or Mac environment that we don't support native deployment for.
We are not yet recommending using RSpace-on-Docker for a full production system; we are still evaluating data backup and restoration SOPs.
Overview
RSpace-on-docker runs as 4 separate, networked containers:
- MySQL Database
- RSpace web application
- Aspose document converter
- Snapgene DNA sequence viewer
All persistent data (database, files and logs) use docker volumes. The configuration file deployment.properties
is kept on the host and mounted into the rspace-web container. This enables the configuration file to be easily edited and reapplied following a docker restart.
Pre-requisites
In order to start running RSpace on docker, you'll need to:
- install docker itself and
docker-compose
. - Ask us for an access key to our Research Space Dockerhub account, and a license key for RSpace itself.
Running RSpace
A. We'll send you 3 files. These should all be put in the same directory.
docker-compose.yaml
configures the RSpace Docker application.env
with the current release tags defined for the various docker imagesdeployment.properties
with your RSpace license key set.
B. Now, create a plain-text file called rspace-vars.env
in the same directory and add database credentials for the RSpace database. These will be used to set the database credentials at initial launch. You can change these example values to more secure credentials of your choice.
MYSQL_DATABASE=rspace
MYSQL_USER=rdbuser
MYSQL_PASSWORD=rdbpwd
C. Login to Dockerhub using the docker CLI and the credentials we sent you.
docker login
then you can launch
docker-compose -p rspace up -d
Initial launch will take a few minutes, subsequent launches will be much faster. You can inspect progress in the RSpace log files. Run:
#host >docker ps | grep rspace-web
to get the RSpace web container name, then
#host>docker exec -it <containername> bash
to enter the rspace-web container, then
#container> tail -f /media/rspace/logs-audit/error.log
to view the error log stream
Once running, RSpace will be available on port 8080.
Troubleshooting
Please get in touch if you have any problems launching RSpace using the steps described, via our usual support channels.