birdhouse administration

Warning

This section needs is outdated and needs to be rewritten!

Set up a birdhouse ecosystem server

If you are already familiar with installing single standalone WPS (follow the Installation guides in the documentations of e.g. emu), then you are ready to set up a birdhouse containing flyingpigeon (providing scientific analyses methods), malleefowl (to search and fetch data) and the pheonix (a graphic interface for a web browser including a WMS).

General Remarks

Check the Requirements of your system!
The installation is done as normal user, root rights are causing conflicts.

Prepare Installation

It is recommended to collect the repositories in a separate folder (e.g. birdhouse, but can have a name of your choice):

$ mkdir birdhouse
$ cd birdhouse

Get the source code from GitHub

$ git clone https://github.com/bird-house/flyingpigeon.git
$ git clone https://github.com/bird-house/pyramid-phoenix.git
$ git clone https://github.com/bird-house/malleefowl.git

Run Installation

You can run the installation with default settings. It will create a conda environment and deploy all required software dependencies there.

Note

Read the changing the default configuration if you want to customize the configuration.

In all of the tree folders (malleefowl, flyingpigeon and pyramid-phoenix) run:

$ make install

This installation will take some minutes to fetch all dependencies and install them into separate conda environments.

Start the Services

in all of the birds run:

$ make start

Launching the Phoenix Web App

If the services are running, you can launch the GUI in a common web browser. By default, phoenix is set to port 8081:

firefox http://localhost:8081

or:

firefox https://localhost:8443/

Now you can log in (upper right corner) with your Phoenix password created previously. Phoenix is just a graphical interface with no more function than looking nice ;-).

Register a service in Phoenix Web App

Note

Please read the Phoenix documentation

Your first administration step is to register flyingpigeon as a service. For that, log in with your phoenix password. In the upper right corner is a tool symbol to open the settings. Click on Services and the Register a Service.

Flyingpigeon is per default on port 8093.

The appropriate url is:

http://localhost:8093/wps

Provide service title and name as you like: * Service Title: Flyingpigeon * Service Name: flyingpigeon

check Service Type: Web Processing Service (default) and register.

Optionally, you can check Public access?, to allow unregistered users to launch jobs. (NOT recommended)

Launching a Job

Now your birdhouse ecosysem is set up. The also installed malleefowl is already running in the background and will do a lot of work silently. There is no need to register malleefowl manually!

Launching a job can be performed as a process (Process menu) or with the wizard. To get familliar with the processes provided by each of the birds, read the approriate documentation for each of the services listed in the overview:

Changing the default configuration

You can customize the configuration of the service. Please read the documentation, for example:

Furthermore, you might change the hostname (to make your service accessible from outside), ESGF-node connection, the port or the log-level for more/less information in the administrator logfiles. Here is an example pyramid-phoenix/custom.cfg:

[settings]
hostname = localhost
http-port = 8081
https-port = 8443
log-level = DEBUG
# run 'make passwd' and to generate password hash
phoenix-password = sha256:513....
# generate secret
# python -c "import os; print(''.join('%02x' % ord(x) for x in os.urandom(16)))"
phoenix-secret = d5e8417....30
esgf-search-url = https://esgf-data.dkrz.de/esg-search
wps-url = http://localhost:8091/wps

Update Phoenix Password

To be able to log into the Phoenix GUI once the services are running, it is necessary to generate a password: go into the pyramid-phoenix folder and run:

$ make passwd

This will automatically write a password hash into pyramid-phoenix/custom.cfg

Backups

See the mongodb documentation on how to backup the database. With the following command you can make a dump of the users collection of the Phoenix database:

$ mongodump --port 27027 --db phoenix_db --collection users

Asking for Support

In case of questions or trouble shooting, feel welcome to join the birdhouse chat and get into contact with the developers directly.