docker compose deployment

Using docker-compose, the application can be set up straight-forward on a docker enabled host.

System requirements:

• Docker engine v17.06 or later
• 6GB RAM (2 gigs for elasticsearch, 2 for the crawler, 1 for the rest. the first two would happily eat more, though configuration may be required)

We successfully deployed the application on a Debian 9 VM with 20GB of RAM running with docker 18.06-ce and docker-compose 1.19.0. Technically a distributed deployment (with elasticsearch or the crawler on another host) could be realized, but we didn't try that.

Example Setup

target=/var/lib/docker-compose/ecmwfcrawler
git clone https://github.com/52north/ecmwf-dataset-crawl $target
cd $target
vi .env # set up WEB_DOMAIN and API keys
docker-compose build
docker-compose up -d

Kibana does not start correctly for the first time with the required elasticsearch configuration. To set it up with a workaround:

1. comment out action.auto_create_index: false in elasticsearch/config/elasticsearch.yml
2. (re-)start the application and run a test crawl to populate the elasticsearch indexes
3. visit $WEB_DOMAIN/kibana and follow the kibana setup procedure described in README.md, while the crawl is running
4. reset the elasticsearch config and restart the elasticsearch container

Pitfalls

• After making changes to .env, always restart the setup with --force-recreate
• Don't run docker-compose with --abort-on-container-exit: The frontend container will exit immediately, shutting the whole setup down
• When pulling a new version from the repo with changes to the frontend, remove the existing frontend volume first (otherwise the previous build will continue to be used):

  docker rm ecmwf-dataset-crawl_frontend_1 ecmwf-dataset-crawl_proxy_1
  docker volume rm ecmwf-dataset-crawl_frontend

• When deploying the setup behind another reverse proxy
  • configure WEB_DOMAIN to be the internal hostname with which the reverse proxy refers the service
  • If you don't specify a port, 2015 will be selected
  • You should be able to use a non root base URL (eg /crawler)

TODO: RAM optimizations for elasticsearch & crawler container, proxy set up