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Tracker

Generic research tracking system

Deployment Guide

Debian

For fuller details, including a script for a complete Debian deployment, see the Debian deployment page.

There is a Debian PPA for Jessie, although there’s no architecture-dependent code so this also works fine for Wheezy. Add the following line to your /etc/apt/sources.list file:

deb http://dl.bintray.com/morungos/deb jessie main

Then you can use the following commands to install:

$ sudo apt-get update
$ apt-get install tracker-webapp

Debian Jessie is preferred because openjdk-8-jre is a recommended dependency, and this is not (yet) available in any Ubuntu LTS server releases. However, on Wheezy you can also get by using Oracle Java 8 through the oracle-java8-installer package.

For a Debian deployment, the tracker uses the following locations:

All can be symlinked to other locations if needed, either before or after the tracker is installed.

In addition, the tracker sets up a pid file at:

This can’t be symlinked, as Debian standards specify this is likely a temporary file system and will be erased on boot. However, the only thing stored here is a pid file, which is not a risk for information access.

Storage

The tracker uses a regular relational database, typically MySQL with the InnoDB storage engine for transaction management. By default under Debian a MySQL database is configured, but if needed, the database configuration can be changed later to any other database.

Docker

Thanks to Morgan Taschuk, there is some work on compatibility with Docker.

Download and install the latest version of Docker and build the container.

sudo docker build -t tracker .

Then you can launch it using the following:

sudo docker run -p 9999:9999 -i -t tracker

This starts the tracker running at http://localhost:9999. Use the authorization credentials username admin and password admin to access the test data.

Configuration

There are several configuration files in /etc/tracker

The settings can be configured in /etc/tracker/tracker.properties, which will typically look something like this:

## LDAP settings
ldap_domain=ads.uhnresearch.ca
ldap_host=127.0.0.1
ldap_port=389
ldap_timeout=60
ldap_search_template=OU=user,OU=accounts,DC=ads,DC=uhnresearch,DC=ca
ldap_filter_template=(userPrincipalName={0})

## Database settings
db_user=xxx
db_password=xxx
db_host=localhost
db_port=3306
db_name=tracker