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Presenting the La Toolkit

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Presenting the Living Atlases Toolkit

Jun-2021

Vicente J. Ruiz Jurado LA Technical Coordinator also taking care of GBIF.es infra

Atlas of Living Australia

Free/Libre and Open-Source Software for the aggregation and delivery of biodiversity data

6M lines of code (available in Github)

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ALA Install

  • The official software to automatic deploy and maintain Living Atlas (LA) portals
  • In other words: this code install automatically the ALA software
  • ala-install has 112,000 lines of code
  • this is ≈ 10,000 admin tasks to deploy a small LA portal
  • this is why and how we avoid manual installation tasks
  • In summary: let the machines do the work for you

https://github.com/atlasoflivingaustralia/ala-install

Ansible

ala-install uses ansible to automatize their deployments.

Using a metaphor:

  • ansible is like a "kitchen robot",
  • and ala-install is like our "recipes book" that describes with code how to install and maintain each LA Portal services automatically.

Advantages

  • You can deploy your LA portal with the same deployment code that ALA and other LA portals use
  • ... and this is independent of the size of your LA portal
  • maintained by ALA and part of the LA community
  • if something fails during deploy, probably it fails for others portals too

But "recipes" needs "ingredients"

Each ansible "recipe" (in fact they are called ansible playbooks), needs your local "ingredients". These are the ansible inventories.

Ansible inventories

There are some text files that describes your LA portal with info like:

  • domain, organization name, contact email
  • the servers you want to use for each service, and how your services urls will look like
  • passwords and security info (like Google API keys)
  • etcetera

So each LA portal needs their custom ansible inventories, and with some many configuration options is not an easy task.

We developed other tools

From the LA community we have developed previously other tools to help with these customizations like:

among other tools...

But this is not enough

  • The deployment is still difficult for newcomers
  • It requires some GNU/Linux deployment environment with all the tools (like ansible) well configured
  • It requires some sysadmin knowledge

so I decided to put the things easier

Introducing the

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This toolkit facilitates the installation, maintenance and monitor of Living Atlases portals

How

With an user friendly interface we put all these parts together in an up-to-date environment to perform the common maintenance tasks of a LA portal.

Lets see it in action creating a sample LA portal...

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Intro and first Project Creation

Goals

  • Mainly: this LA toolkit is like an big assistant to the different phases and tasks of the deployment and maintenance of LA portal
  • Self documentation: it's full of contextual help and informative tip panels
  • Education and training: The toolkit tries to not obfuscate the internals of a LA portal management, so people interested can tweak and do the same tasks manually from the command line
  • With examples: Also it includes other LA portals configurations as templates to help newcomers to setup their new portals
  • Developed since Jan-2021

Links

Demo: http://toolkit-demo.l-a.site/ Try it: https://github.com/living-atlases/la-toolkit/

Thanks

End

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