Deploying a Hosted Site

This is a draft page documenting our process for deploying a hosted CKAN site, should become a step-by-step doc for everything for a standard hosted CKAN deployment, including setting up the servers, installing extensions, and doing basic customisations.

Create a custom extension for the site. See: https://github.com/okfn/ckan/wiki/Creating-a-CKAN-Extension-for-a-Custom-Site

Deploying the Site

The normal process to have one webserver which runs Apache and Nginx, and a dbserver which runs Solr and PostgreSQL. The following process is expected to be run after the bootstrap process which should install all the necessary packages.

Setting up the webserver

Deployments are owned by the okfn user on the server. If you're logged in as a different user, switch to okfn user with

sudo su okfn

Create the directories for the code, configuration, and the filestore.

sudo mkdir -p /etc/ckan/edo
sudo mkdir -p /usr/lib/ckan/edo
sudo mkdir -p /var/lib/ckan/edo
sudo chown okfn /etc/ckan/edo
sudo chown okfn /usr/lib/ckan/edo
sudo chown www-data /var/lib/ckan/edo

Setup a virtualenv in /usr/lib/ckan/edo and activate it

virtualenv --no-site-packages /usr/lib/ckan/edo
source /usr/lib/ckan/edo/bin/activate

Install ckan and switch to the correct branch

pip install -e git://github.com/okfn/ckan.git#egg=ckan
cd /usr/lib/ckan/edo/src/ckan
git checkout release-v2.0

Install the ckan-edo extension (and other extensions that need to be installed).

pip install -e git://github.com/okfn/ckanext-edo.git#egg=ckanext_edo

Install CKAN's dependencies into the virtualenv:

pip install -r /usr/lib/ckan/edo/src/ckan/pip-requirements.txt

Create a configuration file with

paster make-config ckan /etc/ckan/edo/production.ini

Edit the config file appropriately. Will need to come back to this once the database is set up.

Create /etc/ckan/edo/apache.wsgi using https://github.com/okfn/ckanbuild/blob/master/etc/ckan/apache.wsgi as a template. Correct activate_this to os.path.join('/usr/lib/ckan/edo/bin/activate_this.py')

Setting up the dbserver

The right packages should be installed on the machine already as part of the ansible process.

Clone ckanbuild

git clone https://github.com/okfn/ckanbuild.git

Create the database. A password will be prompted, use that to set the password of the edo user.

 cd ckanbuild/bin
 ./dbserver.sh createdb edo

Edit the configuration on the webserver to add access to the postgresql db just created.

Setting up the DataStore