CKAN: Getting Started for Development

Prerequisites

CKAN has a rich tech stack so we have opted to standardize our instructions with Docker Compose, which will help you spin up every service in a few commands.

If you already have Docker-compose, you are ready to go!

If not, please, follow instructions on how to install docker-compose.

On Ubuntu you can run:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install docker-compose

Cloning the repo

git clone https://github.com/okfn/docker-ckan
# or git clone git@github.com:okfn/docker-ckan.git
cd docker-ckan

Booting CKAN

Create a local environment file:

cp .env.example .env

Build and Run the instances:

'docker-compose' must be run with 'sudo'. If you want to change this, you can follow the steps below. NOTE: The 'docker' group grants privileges equivalent to the 'root' user.

Create the docker group: sudo groupadd docker

Add your user to the docker group: sudo usermod -aG docker $USER

Change the storage directory ownership from root to ckan by adding the commads below to the ckan/Dockerfile.dev

RUN mkdir -p /var/lib/ckan/storage/uploads
RUN chown -R ckan:ckan /var/lib/ckan/storage

At this point, you can log out and log back in for these changes to apply. You can also use the command newgrp docker to temporarily enable the new group for the current terminal session.

docker-compose -f docker-compose.dev.yml up --build

When you see this log message:

You can navigate to http://localhost:5000

CKAN Home Page

and log in with the credentials that docker-compose setup created for you [user: ckan_admin password:test1234].

To learn key concepts about CKAN, including what it is and how it works, you can read the User Guide.

CKAN User Guide.

Next Steps

Play around with CKAN portal.

Troubleshooting

Change the URL from http://ckan:5000 to http://localhost:5000. A complete fix is described in the Play around with CKAN portal. (Your next step. ;))