CKAN Administration

More information on deploying/administering CKAN (like adding/removing extensions and editing the theme), may be found in the wiki of the GitHub repo for our fork of the CKAN Docker repo.

Changes that can be made through the frontend

There's a lot of documentation on publishing data on our CKAN portal here.

A few samples (to eventually migrate over):

Canonical Views

If you want to set a map or data table to be on the dataset landing page, you create a corresponding "view" under one of the resources in the dataset and then click the "Canonical View" button for that view. The catch is that CKAN does not enforce that only one view may be canonical, so if multiple views have their "Canonical View" button depressed, one of them will be chosen by CKAN to be the displayed one, and you will have to unclick others in order to get the one you want to display on the dataset landing page.

Writing dataset descriptions

The description field supports some limited markup, which appears to be a subset of Markdown.

Starting a line with a single pound sign (#) indicates that the line should be in bigger, title text, but two pound signs (##) do not give a different font size, as they do in standard Markdown.

Dashes can be used to denote elements in an unordered list (though I haven't been able to get nested lists to work).

Use backticks to indicate that a sans serif font should be use to represent code, like `this`.

Images, links, bold and italic text all work.

It seems like it's limited to the original [1](very basic specification of Markdown).

Changes that can be made through the backend

Configuring the CKAN server

(The contents of this section were initially taken from the ORIENTATION file in /home/ubuntu on the CKAN production server.)

The main CKAN config file is at /etc/ckan/default/production.ini

To monitor HTTP requests in real-time: > tail -f /var/log/nginx/access.log

Service-worker activity (like the Express Loader uploading files to the datastore and background geocoding) can be found in: /var/log/ckan-worker.log

Edit templates here (changes to templates should show up when reloading the relevant web pages): /usr/lib/ckan/default/src/ckanext-wprdctheme/ckanext/wprdc/templates

templates/terms.html is the source for the pop-up version of the Terms of Use. There appears to be no template linked to the "Terms" hyperlink.

Create a file templates/foo.html and then run > sudo service supervisor restart and THEN load data.wprdc.org/foo.html in your browser, and the page will be there.

Presumably data.wprdc.org/foo/ can be populated by creating a file at templates/foo/index.html.

Managing the CKAN server

To restart the Express Loader: > sudo supervisorctl restart ckan-worker:*

To edit the background worker configuration (including increasing the number of background workers),
1. Edit the config file: > vi /etc/supervisor/conf.d/supervisor-ckan-worker.conf
2. Tell Supervisor to use the new configuration: > sudo supervisorctl reread
3. Update the deployed configuration to start the desired number of workers: > sudo supervisorctl update

Activate the virtual environment that lets you run paster commands: > . /usr/lib/ckan/default/bin/activate

Managing the Docker containers

> cd docker-ckan

> docker ps

should return a list of running containers, which should include the following container names: datapusher-plus, ckan, solr, and redis.

Use > sudo docker-compose logs --tail=100 ckan to show the last 100 lines of the log for the ckan Docker instance.

Adding/changing departments of publishers

To add or change the departments belonging to a particular publisher organization edit the dataset_schema.json file: > vi /usr/lib/ckan/default/src/ckanext-scheming/ckanext/scheming/dataset_schema.json

Then run > sudo service apache2 reload

The extra tricky part about this one is that our GitHub repository that includes this JSON file is installed in a different directory: /usr/lib/ckan/default/src/ckanext-wprdctheme/ but changes to the files in that directory (and subdirectories) do nothing.

Dealing with inadequate disk space

Once, we were seeing OSError: write error in the CKAN Docker logs and had to increase disk space to make CKAN function again.

Steve on increasing volume size on AWS: > if you ever have to increase a volume, here’s what i followed to make the filesystem use the new space: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/recognize-expanded-volume-linux.html that server was a Xen instance

Other changes

Using CKAN metadata instead of local caches

To avoid keeping local databases about datasets (for instance, when writing code to track some aspect of datasets), store such information (such as the last time an ETL job was run on a given package) in the 'extras' metadata field of the CKAN package, as much as possible. This stores information in a centralized location so ETL jobs can be run from multiple computers without any other coordination. The extras metadata fields are cataloged on the CKAN Metadata page.

Hacky workaround for adding new users to publishers

In additional to adding the users to the organizations through the CKAN front-end, you also have to add them to groups, using this URL: [2]