Configuration

Now that you’ve successfully logged into Dataverse with a superuser account after going through a basic Installation, you’ll need to secure and configure your installation.

Settings within Dataverse itself are managed via JVM options or by manipulating values in the setting table directly or through API calls.

Once you have finished securing and configuring your Dataverse installation, you may proceed to the Admin Guide for more information on the ongoing administration of a Dataverse installation. Advanced configuration topics are covered in the TwoRavens, Shibboleth and OAuth Login Options sections.

Contents:

Securing Your Installation

Changing the Superuser Password

The default password for the “dataverseAdmin” superuser account is “admin”, as mentioned in the Installation section, and you should change it, of course.

Blocking API Endpoints

The Native API contains a useful but potentially dangerous API endpoint called “admin” that allows you to change system settings, make ordinary users into superusers, and more. The “builtin-users” endpoint lets people create a local/builtin user account if they know the key defined in BuiltinUsers.KEY. The endpoint “test” is not used but is where testing code maybe be added (see https://github.com/IQSS/dataverse/issues/4137 ).

By default, most APIs can be operated on remotely and a number of endpoints do not require authentication. The endpoints “admin” and “test” are limited to localhost out of the box by the settings :BlockedApiEndpoints and :BlockedApiPolicy.

It is very important to keep the block in place for the “admin” endpoint (and at least consider blocking “builtin-users”). Please note that documentation for the “admin” endpoint is spread across the Native API section of the API Guide and the Admin Guide.

It’s also possible to prevent file uploads via API by adjusting the :UploadMethods database setting.

Forcing HTTPS

To avoid having your users send credentials in the clear, it’s strongly recommended to force all web traffic to go through HTTPS (port 443) rather than HTTP (port 80). The ease with which one can install a valid SSL cert into Apache compared with the same operation in Payara might be a compelling enough reason to front Payara with Apache. In addition, Apache can be configured to rewrite HTTP to HTTPS with rules such as those found at https://wiki.apache.org/httpd/RewriteHTTPToHTTPS or in the section on Shibboleth.

Recording User IP Addresses

By default, Dataverse captures the IP address from which requests originate. This is used for multiple purposes including controlling access to the admin API, IP-based user groups and Make Data Count reporting. When Dataverse is configured behind a proxy such as a load balancer, this default setup may not capture the correct IP address. In this case all the incoming requests will be logged in the access logs, MDC logs etc., as if they are all coming from the IP address(es) of the load balancer itself. Proxies usually save the original address in an added HTTP header, from which it can be extracted. For example, AWS LB records the “true” original address in the standard X-Forwarded-For header. If your Dataverse is running behind an IP-masking proxy, but you would like to use IP groups, or record the true geographical location of the incoming requests with Make Data Count, you may enable the IP address lookup from the proxy header using the JVM option dataverse.useripaddresssourceheader, described further below.

Before doing so however, you must absolutely consider the security risks involved! This option must be enabled only on a Dataverse that is in fact fully behind a proxy that properly, and consistently, adds the X-Forwarded-For (or a similar) header to every request it forwards. Consider the implications of activating this option on a Dataverse that is not running behind a proxy, or running behind one, but still accessible from the insecure locations bypassing the proxy: Anyone can now add the header above to an incoming reqest, supplying an arbitrary IP address that Dataverse will trust as the true origin of the call. Thus giving an attacker an easy way to, for example, get in a privileged IP group. The implications could be even more severe if an attacker were able to pretend to be coming from localhost, if Dataverse is configured to trust localhost connections for unrestricted access to the admin API! We have addressed this by making it so that Dataverse should never accept localhost, 127.0.0.1, 0:0:0:0:0:0:0:1 etc. when supplied in such a header. But if you have reasons to still find this risk unacceptable, you may want to consider turning open localhost access to the API off (See Securing Your Installation for more information.)

This is how to verify that your proxy or load balancer, etc. is handling the originating address headers properly and securely: Make sure access logging is enabled in your application server (Payara) configuration. (<http-service access-logging-enabled="true"> in the domain.xml). Add the address header to the access log format. For example, on a system behind AWS ELB, you may want to use something like %client.name% %datetime% %request% %status% %response.length% %header.referer% %header.x-forwarded-for%. Once enabled, access the Dataverse from outside the LB. You should now see the real IP address of your remote client in the access log. For example, something like: "1.2.3.4" "01/Jun/2020:12:00:00 -0500" "GET /dataverse.xhtml HTTP/1.1" 200 81082  "NULL-REFERER" "128.64.32.16"

In this example, 128.64.32.16 is your remote address (that you should verify), and 1.2.3.4 is the address of your LB. If you’re not seeing your remote address in the log, do not activate the JVM option! Also, verify that all the entries in the log have this header populated. The only entries in the access log that you should be seeing without this header (logged as "NULL-HEADER-X-FORWARDED-FOR") are local requests, made from localhost, etc. In this case, since the request is not coming through the proxy, the local IP address should be logged as the primary one (as the first value in the log entry, %client.name%). If you see any requests coming in from remote, insecure subnets without this header - do not use the JVM option!

Once you are ready, enable the JVM option. Verify that the remote locations are properly tracked in your MDC metrics, and/or your IP groups are working. As a final test, if your Dataverse is allowing unrestricted localhost access to the admin API, imitate an attack in which a malicious request is pretending to be coming from 127.0.0.1. Try the following from a remote, insecure location:

curl https://your.dataverse.edu/api/admin/settings --header "X-FORWARDED-FOR: 127.0.0.1"

First of all, confirm that access is denied! If you are in fact able to access the settings api from a location outside the proxy, something is seriously wrong, so please let us know, and stop using the JVM option. Otherwise check the access log entry for the header value. What you should see is something like "127.0.0.1, 128.64.32.16". Where the second address should be the real IP of your remote client. The fact that the “fake” 127.0.0.1 you sent over is present in the header is perfectly ok. This is the proper proxy behavior - it preserves any incoming values in the X-Forwarded-Header, if supplied, and adds the detected incoming address to it, on the right. It is only this rightmost comma-separated value that Dataverse should ever be using.

Still feel like activating this option in your configuration? - Have fun and be safe!

Privacy Considerations

Email Privacy

Out of the box, Dataverse will list email addresses of the contacts for datasets when users visit a dataset page and click the “Export Metadata” button. Additionally, out of the box, Dataverse will list email addresses of dataverse contacts via API (see View a Dataverse in the Native API section of the API Guide). If you would like to exclude these email addresses from export, set :ExcludeEmailFromExport to true.

Additional Recommendations

Run Payara as a User Other Than Root

See the Payara section of Prerequisites for details and init scripts for running Payara as non-root.

Related to this is that you should remove /root/.payara/pass to ensure that Payara isn’t ever accidentally started as root. Without the password, Payara won’t be able to start as root, which is a good thing.

Enforce Strong Passwords for User Accounts

Dataverse only stores passwords (as salted hash, and using a strong hashing algorithm) for “builtin” users. You can increase the password complexity rules to meet your security needs. If you have configured your Dataverse installation to allow login from remote authentication providers such as Shibboleth, ORCID, GitHub or Google, you do not have any control over those remote providers’ password complexity rules. See the Auth Modes: Local vs. Remote vs. Both section below for more on login options.

Even if you are satisfied with the out-of-the-box password complexity rules Dataverse ships with, for the “dataverseAdmin” account you should use a strong password so the hash cannot easily be cracked through dictionary attacks.

Password complexity rules for “builtin” accounts can be adjusted with a variety of settings documented below. Here’s a list:

Network Ports

Remember how under “Decisions to Make” in the Preparation section we mentioned you’ll need to make a decision about whether or not to introduce a proxy in front of Dataverse such as Apache or nginx? The time has come to make that decision.

The need to redirect port HTTP (port 80) to HTTPS (port 443) for security has already been mentioned above and the fact that Payara puts these services on 8080 and 8181, respectively, was touched on in the Installation section. In production, you don’t want to tell your users to use Dataverse on ports 8080 and 8181. You should have them use the standard HTTPS port, which is 443.

Your decision to proxy or not should primarily be driven by which features of Dataverse you’d like to use. If you’d like to use Shibboleth, the decision is easy because proxying or “fronting” Payara with Apache is required. The details are covered in the Shibboleth section.

If you’d like to use TwoRavens, you should also consider fronting with Apache because you will be required to install an Apache anyway to make use of the rApache module. For details, see the TwoRavens section.

Even if you have no interest in Shibboleth nor TwoRavens, you may want to front Dataverse with Apache or nginx to simply the process of installing SSL certificates. There are many tutorials on the Internet for adding certs to Apache, including a some notes used by the Dataverse team, but the process of adding a certificate to Payara is arduous and not for the faint of heart. The Dataverse team cannot provide much help with adding certificates to Payara beyond linking to tips on the web.

Still not convinced you should put Payara behind another web server? Even if you manage to get your SSL certificate into Payara, how are you going to run Payara on low ports such as 80 and 443? Are you going to run Payara as root? Bad idea. This is a security risk. Under “Additional Recommendations” under “Securing Your Installation” above you are advised to configure Payara to run as a user other than root.

There’s also the issue of serving a production-ready version of robots.txt. By using a proxy such as Apache, this is a one-time “set it and forget it” step as explained below in the “Going Live” section.

If you are convinced you’d like to try fronting Payara with Apache, the Shibboleth section should be good resource for you.

If you really don’t want to front Payara with any proxy (not recommended), you can configure Payara to run HTTPS on port 443 like this:

./asadmin set server-config.network-config.network-listeners.network-listener.http-listener-2.port=443

What about port 80? Even if you don’t front Dataverse with Apache, you may want to let Apache run on port 80 just to rewrite HTTP to HTTPS as described above. You can use a similar command as above to change the HTTP port that Payara uses from 8080 to 80 (substitute http-listener-1.port=80). Payara can be used to enforce HTTPS on its own without Apache, but configuring this is an exercise for the reader. Answers here may be helpful: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/25122025/glassfish-v4-java-7-port-unification-error-not-able-to-redirect-http-to

If you are running an installation with Apache and Payara on the same server, and would like to restrict Payara from responding to any requests to port 8080 from external hosts (in other words, not through Apache), you can restrict the AJP listener to localhost only with:

./asadmin set server-config.network-config.network-listeners.network-listener.http-listener-1.address=127.0.0.1

You should NOT use the configuration option above if you are running in a load-balanced environment, or otherwise have the web server on a different host than the application server.

Root Dataverse Permissions

The user who creates a dataverse is given the “Admin” role on that dataverse. The root dataverse is created automatically for you by the installer and the “Admin” is the superuser account (“dataverseAdmin”) we used in the Installation section to confirm that we can log in. These next steps of configuring the root dataverse require the “Admin” role on the root dataverse, but not the much more powerful superuser attribute. In short, users with the “Admin” role are subject to the permission system. A superuser, on the other hand, completely bypasses the permission system. You can give non-superusers the “Admin” role on the root dataverse if you’d like them to configure the root dataverse.

In order for non-superusers to start creating dataverses or datasets, you need click “Edit” then “Permissions” and make choices about which users can add dataverses or datasets within the root dataverse. (There is an API endpoint for this operation as well.) Again, the user who creates a dataverse will be granted the “Admin” role on that dataverse. Non-superusers who are not “Admin” on the root dataverse will not be able to do anything useful until the root dataverse has been published.

As the person installing Dataverse you may or may not be a local metadata expert. You may want to have others sign up for accounts and grant them the “Admin” role at the root dataverse to configure metadata fields, templates, browse/search facets, guestbooks, etc. For more on these topics, consult the Dataverse Management section of the User Guide.

Persistent Identifiers and Publishing Datasets

Persistent identifiers are a required and integral part of the Dataverse platform. They provide a URL that is guaranteed to resolve to the datasets or files they represent. Dataverse currently supports creating identifiers using DOI and Handle.

By default, the installer configures a default DOI namespace (10.5072) with DataCite as the registration provider. Please note that as of the release 4.9.3, we can no longer use EZID as the provider. Unlike EZID, DataCite requires that you register for a test account, configured with your own prefix (please contact support@datacite.org). Once you receive the login name, password, and prefix for the account, configure the credentials in your domain.xml, as the following two JVM options:

<jvm-options>-Ddoi.username=...</jvm-options>
<jvm-options>-Ddoi.password=...</jvm-options>

and restart Payara. The prefix can be configured via the API (where it is referred to as “Authority”):

curl -X PUT -d 10.xxxx http://localhost:8080/api/admin/settings/:Authority

Once this is done, you will be able to publish datasets and files, but the persistent identifiers will not be citable, and they will only resolve from the DataCite test environment (and then only if the Dataverse from which you published them is accessible - DOIs minted from your laptop will not resolve). Note that any datasets or files created using the test configuration cannot be directly migrated and would need to be created again once a valid DOI namespace is configured.

To properly configure persistent identifiers for a production installation, an account and associated namespace must be acquired for a fee from a DOI or HDL provider. DataCite (https://www.datacite.org) is the recommended DOI provider (see https://dataverse.org/global-dataverse-community-consortium for more on joining DataCite) but EZID (http://ezid.cdlib.org) is an option for the University of California according to https://www.cdlib.org/cdlinfo/2017/08/04/ezid-doi-service-is-evolving/ . Handle.Net (https://www.handle.net) is the HDL provider.

Once you have your DOI or Handle account credentials and a namespace, configure Dataverse to use them using the JVM options and database settings below.

Configuring Dataverse for DOIs

By default Dataverse attempts to register DOIs for each dataset and file under a test authority, though you must apply for your own credentials as explained above.

Here are the configuration options for DOIs:

JVM Options:

Database Settings:

Configuring Dataverse for Handles

Here are the configuration options for handles:

JVM Options:

Database Settings:

Note: If you are minting your own handles and plan to set up your own handle service, please refer to Handle.Net documentation.

Auth Modes: Local vs. Remote vs. Both

There are three valid configurations or modes for authenticating users to Dataverse:

Local Only Auth

Out of the box, Dataverse is configured in “local only” mode. The “dataverseAdmin” superuser account mentioned in the Installation section is an example of a local account. Internally, these accounts are called “builtin” because they are built in to the Dataverse application itself.

Both Local and Remote Auth

The authenticationproviderrow database table controls which “authentication providers” are available within Dataverse. Out of the box, a single row with an id of “builtin” will be present. For each user in Dataverse, the authenticateduserlookup table will have a value under authenticationproviderid that matches this id. For example, the default “dataverseAdmin” user will have the value “builtin” under authenticationproviderid. Why is this important? Users are tied to a specific authentication provider but conversion mechanisms are available to switch a user from one authentication provider to the other. As explained in the Account Creation + Management section of the User Guide, a graphical workflow is provided for end users to convert from the “builtin” authentication provider to a remote provider. Conversion from a remote authentication provider to the builtin provider can be performed by a sysadmin with access to the “admin” API. See the Native API section of the API Guide for how to list users and authentication providers as JSON.

Adding and enabling a second authentication provider (Add Authentication Provider and Enable or Disable an Authentication Provider) will result in the Log In page showing additional providers for your users to choose from. By default, the Log In page will show the “builtin” provider, but you can adjust this via the :DefaultAuthProvider configuration option. Further customization can be achieved by setting :AllowSignUp to “false”, thus preventing users from creating local accounts via the web interface. Please note that local accounts can also be created via API, and the way to prevent this is to block the builtin-users endpoint (:BlockedApiEndpoints) or scramble (or remove) the BuiltinUsers.KEY database setting (BuiltinUsers.KEY).

To configure Shibboleth see the Shibboleth section and to configure OAuth see the OAuth Login Options section.

Remote Only Auth

As for the “Remote only” authentication mode, it means that:

  • Shibboleth or OAuth has been enabled.
  • :AllowSignUp is set to “false” to prevent users from creating local accounts via the web interface.
  • :DefaultAuthProvider has been set to use the desired authentication provider
  • The “builtin” authentication provider has been disabled (Enable or Disable an Authentication Provider). Note that disabling the “builtin” authentication provider means that the API endpoint for converting an account from a remote auth provider will not work. Converting directly from one remote authentication provider to another (i.e. from GitHub to Google) is not supported. Conversion from remote is always to “builtin”. Then the user initiates a conversion from “builtin” to remote. Note that longer term, the plan is to permit multiple login options to the same Dataverse account per https://github.com/IQSS/dataverse/issues/3487 (so all this talk of conversion will be moot) but for now users can only use a single login option, as explained in the Account Creation + Management section of the User Guide. In short, “remote only” might work for you if you only plan to use a single remote authentication provider such that no conversion between remote authentication providers will be necessary.

File Storage: Using a Local Filesystem and/or Swift and/or S3 object stores

By default, a Dataverse installation stores all data files (files uploaded by end users) on the filesystem at /usr/local/payara5/glassfish/domains/domain1/files. This path can vary based on answers you gave to the installer (see the Running the Dataverse Installer section of the Installation Guide) or afterward by reconfiguring the dataverse.files.directory JVM option described below.

Dataverse can alternately store files in a Swift or S3-compatible object store, and can now be configured to support multiple stores at once. With a multi-store configuration, the location for new files can be controlled on a per-dataverse basis.

The following sections describe how to set up various types of stores and how to configure for multiple stores.

Multi-store Basics

To support multiple stores, Dataverse now requires an id, type, and label for each store (even for a single store configuration). These are configured by defining two required jvm options:

./asadmin $ASADMIN_OPTS create-jvm-options "\-Ddataverse.files.<id>.type=<type>"
./asadmin $ASADMIN_OPTS create-jvm-options "\-Ddataverse.files.<id>.label=<label>"

Out of the box, Dataverse is configured to use local file storage in the ‘file’ store by default. You can add additional stores and, as a superuser, configure specific dataverses to use them (by editing the ‘General Information’ for the dataverse as described in the Managing Datasets and Dataverses section).

Note that the “-Ddataverse.files.directory”, if defined, continues to control where temporary files are stored (in the /temp subdir of that directory), independent of the location of any ‘file’ store defined above.

If you wish to change which store is used by default, you’ll need to delete the existing default storage driver and set a new one using jvm options.

./asadmin $ASADMIN_OPTS delete-jvm-options "-Ddataverse.files.storage-driver-id=file"
./asadmin $ASADMIN_OPTS create-jvm-options "-Ddataverse.files.storage-driver-id=<id>"

It is also possible to set maximum file upload size limits per store. See the :MaxFileUploadSizeInBytes setting below.

File Storage

File stores have one option - the directory where files should be stored. This can be set using

./asadmin $ASADMIN_OPTS create-jvm-options "\-Ddataverse.files.<id>.directory=<file directory>"

Multiple file stores should specify different directories (which would nominally be the reason to use multiple file stores), but one may share the same directory as “-Ddataverse.files.directory” option - this would result in temp files being stored in the /temp subdirectory within the file store’s root directory.

Swift Storage

Rather than storing data files on the filesystem, you can opt for an experimental setup with a Swift Object Storage backend. Each dataset that users create gets a corresponding “container” on the Swift side, and each data file is saved as a file within that container.

In order to configure a Swift installation, you need to complete these steps to properly modify the JVM options:

First, run all the following create commands with your Swift endpoint information and credentials:

./asadmin $ASADMIN_OPTS create-jvm-options "\-Ddataverse.files.<id>.type=swift"
./asadmin $ASADMIN_OPTS create-jvm-options "\-Ddataverse.files.<id>.defaultEndpoint=endpoint1"
./asadmin $ASADMIN_OPTS create-jvm-options "\-Ddataverse.files.<id>.authType.endpoint1=your-auth-type"
./asadmin $ASADMIN_OPTS create-jvm-options "\-Ddataverse.files.<id>.authUrl.endpoint1=your-auth-url"
./asadmin $ASADMIN_OPTS create-jvm-options "\-Ddataverse.files.<id>.tenant.endpoint1=your-tenant-name"
./asadmin $ASADMIN_OPTS create-jvm-options "\-Ddataverse.files.<id>.username.endpoint1=your-username"
./asadmin $ASADMIN_OPTS create-jvm-options "\-Ddataverse.files.<id>.endpoint.endpoint1=your-swift-endpoint"

auth_type can either be keystone, keystone_v3, or it will assumed to be basic. auth_url should be your keystone authentication URL which includes the tokens (e.g. for keystone, https://openstack.example.edu:35357/v2.0/tokens and for keystone_v3, https://openstack.example.edu:35357/v3/auth/tokens). swift_endpoint is a URL that looks something like http://rdgw.swift.example.org/swift/v1.

Then create a password alias by running (without changes):

./asadmin $ASADMIN_OPTS create-jvm-options "\-Ddataverse.files.swift.password.endpoint1='\${ALIAS=swiftpassword-alias}'"
./asadmin $ASADMIN_OPTS create-password-alias swiftpassword-alias

The second command will trigger an interactive prompt asking you to input your Swift password.

Second, update the JVM option dataverse.files.storage-driver-id by running the delete command:

./asadmin $ASADMIN_OPTS delete-jvm-options "\-Ddataverse.files.storage-driver-id=file"

Then run the create command:

./asadmin $ASADMIN_OPTS create-jvm-options "\-Ddataverse.files.storage-driver-id=swift"

You also have the option to set a custom container name separator. It is initialized to _, but you can change it by running the create command:

./asadmin $ASADMIN_OPTS create-jvm-options "\-Ddataverse.files.swift.folderPathSeparator=-"

By default, your Swift installation will be public-only, meaning users will be unable to put access restrictions on their data. If you are comfortable with this level of privacy, the final step in your setup is to set the :PublicInstall setting to true.

In order to enable file access restrictions, you must enable Swift to use temporary URLs for file access. To enable usage of temporary URLs, set a hash key both on your swift endpoint and in your swift.properties file. You can do so by running the create command:

./asadmin $ASADMIN_OPTS create-jvm-options "\-Ddataverse.files.swift.hashKey.endpoint1=your-hash-key"

You also have the option to set a custom expiration length, in seconds, for a generated temporary URL. It is initialized to 60 seconds, but you can change it by running the create command:

./asadmin $ASADMIN_OPTS create-jvm-options "\-Ddataverse.files.swift.temporaryUrlExpiryTime=3600"

In this example, you would be setting the expiration length for one hour.

Setting up Compute with Swift

Once you have configured a Swift Object Storage backend, you also have the option of enabling a connection to a computing environment. To do so, you need to configure the database settings for :ComputeBaseUrl and :CloudEnvironmentName.

Once you have set up :ComputeBaseUrl properly in both Dataverse and your cloud environment, validated users will have three options for accessing the computing environment:

  • Compute on a single dataset
  • Compute on multiple datasets
  • Compute on a single datafile

The compute buttons on dataset and file pages will link validated users to your computing environment. If a user is computing on one dataset, the compute button will redirect to:

:ComputeBaseUrl?datasetPersistentId

If a user is computing on multiple datasets, the compute button will redirect to:

:ComputeBaseUrl/multiparty?datasetPersistentId&anotherDatasetPersistentId&anotherDatasetPersistentId&...

If a user is computing on a single file, depending on the configuration of your installation, the compute button will either redirect to:

:ComputeBaseUrl?datasetPersistentId=yourObject

if your installation’s :PublicInstall setting is true, or:

:ComputeBaseUrl?datasetPersistentId=yourObject&temp_url_sig=yourTempUrlSig&temp_url_expires=yourTempUrlExpiry

You can configure this redirect properly in your cloud environment to generate a temporary URL for access to the Swift objects for computing.

Amazon S3 Storage (or Compatible)

Dataverse supports Amazon S3 storage as well as other S3-compatible stores (like Minio, Ceph RADOS S3 Gateway and many more) for files uploaded to Dataverse.

The Dataverse S3 driver supports multi-part upload for large files (over 1 GB by default - see the min-part-size option in the table below to change this).

Note: The Dataverse Team is most familiar with AWS S3, and can provide support on its usage with Dataverse. Thanks to community contributions, the application’s architecture also allows non-AWS S3 providers. The Dataverse Team can provide very limited support on these other providers. We recommend reaching out to the wider Dataverse community if you have questions.

First: Set Up Accounts and Access Credentials

Dataverse and the AWS SDK make use of the “AWS credentials profile file” and “AWS config profile file” located in ~/.aws/ where ~ is the home directory of the user you run Payara as. This file can be generated via either of two methods described below:

  1. Manually through creation of the credentials and config files or
  2. Automatically via the AWS console commands.
Preparation When Using Amazon’s S3 Service

You’ll need an AWS account with an associated S3 bucket for your installation to use. From the S3 management console (e.g. https://console.aws.amazon.com/), you can poke around and get familiar with your bucket.

Make note of the bucket’s name and the region its data is hosted in.

To create a user with full S3 access and nothing more for security reasons, we recommend using IAM (Identity and Access Management). See IAM User Guide for more info on this process.

Generate the user keys needed for Dataverse afterwards by clicking on the created user. (You can skip this step when running on EC2, see below.)

Tip

If you are hosting Dataverse on an AWS EC2 instance alongside storage in S3, it is possible to use IAM Roles instead of the credentials file (the file at ~/.aws/credentials mentioned below). Please note that you will still need the ~/.aws/config file to specify the region. For more information on this option, see http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/iam-roles-for-amazon-ec2.html

Preparation When Using Custom S3-Compatible Service

We assume you have your S3-compatible custom storage in place, up and running, ready for service.

Please make note of the following details:

  • Endpoint URL - consult the documentation of your service on how to find it.
  • Region: Optional, but some services might use it. Consult your service documentation.
    • Example: us-east-1
  • Access key ID and secret access key: Usually you can generate access keys within the user profile of your service.
    • Example:
      • ID: Q3AM3UQ867SPQQA43P2F
      • Key: zuf+tfteSlswRu7BJ86wekitnifILbZam1KYY3TG
  • Bucket name: Dataverse will fail opening and uploading files on S3 if you don’t create one.
    • Example: dataverse
Manually Set Up Credentials File

To create the ~/.aws/credentials file manually, you will need to generate a key/secret key (see above). Once you have acquired the keys, they need to be added to the credentials file. The format for credentials is as follows:

[default]
aws_access_key_id = <insert key, no brackets>
aws_secret_access_key = <insert secret key, no brackets>

While using Amazon’s service, you must also specify the AWS region in the ~/.aws/config file, for example:

[default]
region = us-east-1

Additional profiles can be added to these files by appending the relevant information in additional blocks:

[default]
aws_access_key_id = <insert key, no brackets>
aws_secret_access_key = <insert secret key, no brackets>

[profilename2]
aws_access_key_id = <insert key, no brackets>
aws_secret_access_key = <insert secret key, no brackets>

Place these two files in a folder named .aws under the home directory for the user running your Dataverse Payara instance. (From the AWS Command Line Interface Documentation: “In order to separate credentials from less sensitive options, region and output format are stored in a separate file named config in the same folder”)

Console Commands to Set Up Access Configuration

Begin by installing the CLI tool pip to install the AWS command line interface if you don’t have it.

First, we’ll get our access keys set up. If you already have your access keys configured, skip this step. From the command line, run:

  • pip install awscli
  • aws configure

You’ll be prompted to enter your Access Key ID and secret key, which should be issued to your AWS account. The subsequent config steps after the access keys are up to you. For reference, the keys will be stored in ~/.aws/credentials, and your AWS access region in ~/.aws/config.

TIP: When using a custom S3 URL endpoint, you need to add it to every aws call: aws --endpoint-url <URL> s3 ...
(you may omit it while configuring).

Second: Configure Dataverse to use S3 Storage

To set up an S3 store, you must define the id, type, and label as for any store:

./asadmin $ASADMIN_OPTS create-jvm-options "\-Ddataverse.files.<id>.type=s3"
./asadmin $ASADMIN_OPTS create-jvm-options "\-Ddataverse.files.<id>.label=<label>"

Then, we’ll need to identify which S3 bucket we’re using. Replace <your_bucket_name> with, of course, your bucket:

./asadmin create-jvm-options "-Ddataverse.files.<id>.bucket-name=<your_bucket_name>"

Optionally, you can have users download files from S3 directly rather than having files pass from S3 through Payara to your users. To accomplish this, set dataverse.files.<id>.download-redirect to true like this:

./asadmin create-jvm-options "-Ddataverse.files.<id>.download-redirect=true"

If you enable dataverse.files.<id>.download-redirect as described above, note that the S3 URLs expire after an hour by default but you can configure the expiration time using the dataverse.files.<id>.url-expiration-minutes JVM option. Here’s an example of setting the expiration time to 120 minutes:

./asadmin create-jvm-options "-Ddataverse.files.<id>.url-expiration-minutes=120"

By default, your store will use the [default] profile in you .aws configuration files. To use a different profile, which would be necessary if you have two s3 stores at different locations, you can specify the profile to use:

./asadmin create-jvm-options "-Ddataverse.files.<id>.profile=<profilename>"

Larger installations may want to increase the number of open S3 connections allowed (default is 256): For example,

./asadmin create-jvm-options "-Ddataverse.files.<id>.connection-pool-size=4096"

In case you would like to configure Dataverse to use a custom S3 service instead of Amazon S3 services, please add the options for the custom URL and region as documented below. Please read above if your desired combination has been tested already and what other options have been set for a successful integration.

Lastly, go ahead and restart your Payara server. With Dataverse deployed and the site online, you should be able to upload datasets and data files and see the corresponding files in your S3 bucket. Within a bucket, the folder structure emulates that found in local file storage.

S3 Storage Options
JVM Option Value Description Default value
dataverse.files.storage-driver-id <id> Enable <id> as the default storage driver. file
dataverse.files.<id>.bucket-name <?> The bucket name. See above. (none)
dataverse.files.<id>.download-redirect true/false Enable direct download or proxy through Dataverse. false
dataverse.files.<id>.upload-redirect true/false Enable direct upload of files added to a dataset to the S3 store. false
dataverse.files.<id>.ingestsizelimit <size in bytes> Maximum size of directupload files that should be ingested (none)
dataverse.files.<id>.url-expiration-minutes <?> If direct uploads/downloads: time until links expire. Optional. 60
dataverse.files.<id>.min-part-size <?> Multipart direct uploads will occur for files larger than this. Optional. 1024**3
dataverse.files.<id>.custom-endpoint-url <?> Use custom S3 endpoint. Needs URL either with or without protocol. (none)
dataverse.files.<id>.custom-endpoint-region <?> Only used when using custom endpoint. Optional. dataverse
dataverse.files.<id>.path-style-access true/false Use path style buckets instead of subdomains. Optional. false
dataverse.files.<id>.payload-signing true/false Enable payload signing. Optional false
dataverse.files.<id>.chunked-encoding true/false Disable chunked encoding. Optional true
dataverse.files.<id>.connection-pool-size <?> The maximum number of open connections to the S3 server 256
Reported Working S3-Compatible Storage
Minio v2018-09-12
Set dataverse.files.<id>.path-style-access=true, as Minio works path-based. Works pretty smooth, easy to setup. Can be used for quick testing, too: just use the example values above. Uses the public (read: unsecure and possibly slow) https://play.minio.io:9000 service.
Surf Object Store v2019-10-30
Set dataverse.files.<id>.payload-signing=true and dataverse.files.<id>.chunked-encoding=false to use Surf Object Store.

HINT: If you are successfully using an S3 storage implementation not yet listed above, please feel free to open an issue at Github and describe your setup. We will be glad to add it here.

Migrating from Local Storage to S3

Is currently documented on the Deployment page.

Branding Your Installation

The name of your root dataverse is the brand of your installation of Dataverse and appears in various places such as notifications and support links, as outlined in the :SystemEmail section below. To further brand your installation and make it your own, Dataverse provides configurable options for easy-to-add (and maintain) custom branding for your Dataverse installation. Here are the custom branding and content options you can add:

  • Custom welcome/homepage
  • Logo image to navbar
  • Header
  • Footer
  • CSS stylesheet

Downloadable sample HTML and CSS files are provided below which you can edit as you see fit. It’s up to you to create a directory in which to store these files, such as /var/www/dataverse in the examples below.

You may also want to look at samples at https://github.com/shlake/LibraDataHomepage from community member Sherry Lake as well as her poster from the Dataverse Community Meeting 2018 called “Branding Your Local Dataverse”: https://github.com/IQSS/dataverse/files/2128735/UVaHomePage.pdf

A simpler option to brand and customize your installation is to utilize the dataverse theme, which each dataverse has, that allows you to change colors, add a logo, tagline or website link to the dataverse header section of the page. Those options are outlined in the Dataverse Management section of the User Guide.

Custom Homepage

Dataverse allows you to use a custom homepage or welcome page in place of the default root dataverse page. This allows for complete control over the look and feel of your installation’s homepage.

Download this sample: custom-homepage.html and place it at /var/www/dataverse/branding/custom-homepage.html.

Once you have the location of your custom homepage HTML file, run this curl command to add it to your settings:

curl -X PUT -d '/var/www/dataverse/branding/custom-homepage.html' http://localhost:8080/api/admin/settings/:HomePageCustomizationFile

If you prefer to start with less of a blank slate, you can download the custom-homepage-dynamic.html template which was built for the Harvard Dataverse, and includes branding messaging, action buttons, search input, subject links, and recent dataset links. This page was built to utilize the Metrics API to deliver dynamic content to the page via javascript.

Note that the custom-homepage.html and custom-homepage-dynamic.html files provided have multiple elements that assume your root dataverse still has an alias of “root”. While you were branding your root dataverse, you may have changed the alias to “harvard” or “librascholar” or whatever and you should adjust the custom homepage code as needed.

For more background on what this curl command above is doing, see the “Database Settings” section below. If you decide you’d like to remove this setting, use the following curl command:

curl -X DELETE http://localhost:8080/api/admin/settings/:HomePageCustomizationFile

Custom Header

Download this sample: custom-header.html and place it at /var/www/dataverse/branding/custom-header.html.

Once you have the location of your custom header HTML file, run this curl command to add it to your settings:

curl -X PUT -d '/var/www/dataverse/branding/custom-header.html' http://localhost:8080/api/admin/settings/:HeaderCustomizationFile

If you have enabled a custom header or navbar logo, you might prefer to disable the theme of the root dataverse. You can do so by setting :DisableRootDataverseTheme to true like this:

curl -X PUT -d 'true' http://localhost:8080/api/admin/settings/:DisableRootDataverseTheme

Please note: Disabling the display of the root dataverse theme also disables your ability to edit it. Remember that dataverse owners can set their dataverses to “inherit theme” from the root. Those dataverses will continue to inherit the root dataverse theme (even though it no longer displays on the root). If you would like to edit the root dataverse theme in the future, you will have to re-enable it first.

Custom Stylesheet

You can style your custom homepage, footer and header content with a custom CSS file. With advanced CSS know-how, you can achieve custom branding and page layouts by utilizing position, padding or margin properties.

Download this sample: custom-stylesheet.css and place it at /var/www/dataverse/branding/custom-stylesheet.css.

Once you have the location of your custom CSS file, run this curl command to add it to your settings:

curl -X PUT -d '/var/www/dataverse/branding/custom-stylesheet.css' http://localhost:8080/api/admin/settings/:StyleCustomizationFile

Internationalization

Dataverse is being translated into multiple languages by the Dataverse community! Please see below for how to help with this effort!

Adding Multiple Languages to the Dropdown in the Header

The presence of the :Languages database setting adds a dropdown in the header for multiple languages. For example to add English and French to the dropdown:

curl http://localhost:8080/api/admin/settings/:Languages -X PUT -d '[{"locale":"en","title":"English"},{"locale":"fr","title":"Français"}]'

Configuring the “lang” Directory

Translations for Dataverse are stored in “properties” files in a directory on disk (e.g. /home/dataverse/langBundles) that you specify with the dataverse.lang.directory dataverse.lang.directory JVM option, like this:

./asadmin create-jvm-options '-Ddataverse.lang.directory=/home/dataverse/langBundles'

Go ahead and create the directory you specified.

mkdir /home/dataverse/langBundles

Creating a languages.zip File

Dataverse provides and API endpoint for adding languages using a zip file.

First, clone the “dataverse-language-packs” git repo.

git clone https://github.com/GlobalDataverseCommunityConsortium/dataverse-language-packs.git

Take a look at https://github.com/GlobalDataverseCommunityConsortium/dataverse-language-packs/branches to see if the version of Dataverse you’re running has translations.

Change to the directory for the git repo you just cloned.

cd dataverse-language-packs

Switch (git checkout) to the branch based on Dataverse version you are running. The branch “dataverse-v4.13” is used in the example below.

export BRANCH_NAME=dataverse-v4.13

git checkout $BRANCH_NAME

Create a “languages” directory in “/tmp”.

mkdir /tmp/languages

Copy the properties files into the “languages” directory

cp -R en_US/*.properties /tmp/languages

cp -R fr_CA/*.properties /tmp/languages

Create the zip file

cd /tmp/languages

zip languages.zip *.properties

Load the languages.zip file into Dataverse

Now that you have a “languages.zip” file, you can load it into Dataverse with the command below.

curl http://localhost:8080/api/admin/datasetfield/loadpropertyfiles -X POST --upload-file /tmp/languages/languages.zip -H "Content-Type: application/zip"

Click on the languages using the drop down in the header to try them out.

How to Help Translate Dataverse Into Your Language

Please join the dataverse-internationalization-wg mailing list and contribute to https://github.com/GlobalDataverseCommunityConsortium/dataverse-language-packs to help translate Dataverse into various languages!

Some external tools are also ready to be translated, especially if they are using the {localeCode} reserved word in their tool manifest. For details, see the Building External Tools section of the API Guide.

Web Analytics Code

Your analytics code can be added to your Dataverse installation in a similar fashion to how you brand it, by adding a custom HTML file containing the analytics code snippet and adding the file location to your settings.

Popular analytics providers Google Analytics (https://www.google.com/analytics/) and Matomo (formerly “Piwik”; https://matomo.org/) have been set up with Dataverse. Use the documentation they provide to add the analytics code to your custom HTML file. This allows for more control of your analytics, making it easier to customize what you prefer to track.

Create your own analytics-code.html file using the analytics code snippet provided by Google or Matomo and place it somewhere on the server, outside the application deployment directory; for example: /var/www/dataverse/branding/analytics-code.html. Here is an example of what your HTML file will look like:

<!-- Global Site Tag (gtag.js) - Google Analytics -->
<script async="async" src="https://www.googletagmanager.com/gtag/js?id=YOUR-ACCOUNT-CODE"></script>
<script>
    //<![CDATA[
    window.dataLayer = window.dataLayer || [];
    function gtag(){dataLayer.push(arguments);}
    gtag('js', new Date());

    gtag('config', 'YOUR-ACCOUNT-CODE');
    //]]>
</script>

IMPORTANT: Note the “async” attribute in the first script line above. In the documentation provided by Google, its value is left blank (as in <script async src="...">). It must be set as in the example above (<script async="async" src="...">), otherwise it may cause problems with some browsers.

Once you have created the analytics file, run this curl command to add it to your settings (using the same file location as in the example above):

curl -X PUT -d '/var/www/dataverse/branding/analytics-code.html' http://localhost:8080/api/admin/settings/:WebAnalyticsCode

Tracking Button Clicks

The basic analytics configuration above tracks page navigation. However, it does not capture potentially interesting events, such as those from users clicking buttons on pages, that do not result in a new page opening. In Dataverse, these events include file downloads, requesting access to restricted data, exporting metadata, social media sharing, requesting citation text, launching external tools or WorldMap, contacting authors, and launching computations.

Both Google and Matomo provide the optional capability to track such events and Dataverse has added CSS style classes (btn-compute, btn-contact, btn-download, btn-explore, btn-export, btn-preview, btn-request, btn-share, and downloadCitation) to it’s HTML to facilitate it.

For Google Analytics, the example script at analytics-code.html will track both page hits and events within Dataverse. You would use this file in the same way as the shorter example above, putting it somewhere outside your deployment directory, replacing YOUR ACCOUNT CODE with your actual code and setting :WebAnalyticsCode to reference it.

Once this script is running, you can look in the Google Analytics console (Realtime/Events or Behavior/Events) and view events by type and/or the Dataset or File the event involves.

BagIt Export

Dataverse may be configured to submit a copy of published Datasets, packaged as Research Data Alliance conformant zipped BagIt bags to Chronopolis via DuraCloud or alternately to any folder on the local filesystem.

Dataverse offers an internal archive workflow which may be configured as a PostPublication workflow via an admin API call to manually submit previously published Datasets and prior versions to a configured archive such as Chronopolis. The workflow creates a JSON-LD serialized OAI-ORE map file, which is also available as a metadata export format in the Dataverse web interface.

At present, the DPNSubmitToArchiveCommand and LocalSubmitToArchiveCommand are the only implementations extending the AbstractSubmitToArchiveCommand and using the configurable mechanisms discussed below.

Duracloud Configuration

Also note that while the current Chronopolis implementation generates the bag and submits it to the archive’s DuraCloud interface, the step to make a ‘snapshot’ of the space containing the Bag (and verify it’s successful submission) are actions a curator must take in the DuraCloud interface.

The minimal configuration to support an archiver integration involves adding a minimum of two Dataverse Keys and any required Payara jvm options. The example instructions here are specific to the DuraCloud Archiver:

:ArchiverClassName - the fully qualified class to be used for archiving. For example:

curl http://localhost:8080/api/admin/settings/:ArchiverClassName -X PUT -d "edu.harvard.iq.dataverse.engine.command.impl.DuraCloudSubmitToArchiveCommand"

:ArchiverSettings - the archiver class can access required settings including existing Dataverse settings and dynamically defined ones specific to the class. This setting is a comma-separated list of those settings. For example:

curl http://localhost:8080/api/admin/settings/:ArchiverSettings -X PUT -d ":DuraCloudHost, :DuraCloudPort, :DuraCloudContext"

The DPN archiver defines three custom settings, one of which is required (the others have defaults):

:DuraCloudHost - the URL for your organization’s Duracloud site. For example:

curl http://localhost:8080/api/admin/settings/:DuraCloudHost -X PUT -d "qdr.duracloud.org"

:DuraCloudPort and :DuraCloudContext are also defined if you are not using the defaults (“443” and “duracloud” respectively). (Note: these settings are only in effect if they are listed in the :ArchiverSettings. Otherwise, they will not be passed to the DuraCloud Archiver class.)

Archivers may require JVM options as well. For the Chronopolis archiver, the username and password associated with your organization’s Chronopolis/DuraCloud account should be configured in Payara:

./asadmin create-jvm-options '-Dduracloud.username=YOUR_USERNAME_HERE'

./asadmin create-jvm-options '-Dduracloud.password=YOUR_PASSWORD_HERE'

Local Path Configuration

ArchiverClassName - the fully qualified class to be used for archiving. For example:

curl -X PUT -d "edu.harvard.iq.dataverse.engine.command.impl.LocalSubmitToArchiveCommand" http://localhost:8080/api/admin/settings/:ArchiverClassName

:BagItLocalPath - the path to where you want to store BagIt. For example:

curl -X PUT -d /home/path/to/storage http://localhost:8080/api/admin/settings/:BagItLocalPath

:ArchiverSettings - the archiver class can access required settings including existing Dataverse settings and dynamically defined ones specific to the class. This setting is a comma-separated list of those settings. For example:

curl http://localhost:8080/api/admin/settings/:ArchiverSettings -X PUT -d ":BagItLocalPath”

:BagItLocalPath is the file path that you’ve set in :ArchiverSettings.

API Call

Once this configuration is complete, you, as a user with the PublishDataset permission, should be able to use the API call to manually submit a DatasetVersion for processing:

curl -H "X-Dataverse-key: <key>" http://localhost:8080/api/admin/submitDataVersionToArchive/{id}/{version}

where:

{id} is the DatasetId (or :persistentId with the ?persistentId="<DOI>" parameter), and

{version} is the friendly version number, e.g. “1.2”.

The submitDataVersionToArchive API (and the workflow discussed below) attempt to archive the dataset version via an archive specific method. For Chronopolis, a DuraCloud space named for the dataset (it’s DOI with ‘:’ and ‘.’ replaced with ‘-‘) is created and two files are uploaded to it: a version-specific datacite.xml metadata file and a BagIt bag containing the data and an OAI-ORE map file. (The datacite.xml file, stored outside the Bag as well as inside is intended to aid in discovery while the ORE map file is ‘complete’, containing all user-entered metadata and is intended as an archival record.)

In the Chronopolis case, since the transfer from the DuraCloud front-end to archival storage in Chronopolis can take significant time, it is currently up to the admin/curator to submit a ‘snap-shot’ of the space within DuraCloud and to monitor its successful transfer. Once transfer is complete the space should be deleted, at which point the Dataverse API call can be used to submit a Bag for other versions of the same Dataset. (The space is reused, so that archival copies of different Dataset versions correspond to different snapshots of the same DuraCloud space.).

PostPublication Workflow

To automate the submission of archival copies to an archive as part of publication, one can setup a Dataverse Workflow using the “archiver” workflow step - see the Workflows guide.

The archiver step uses the configuration information discussed above including the :ArchiverClassName setting. The workflow step definition should include the set of properties defined in :ArchiverSettings in the workflow definition.

To active this workflow, one must first install a workflow using the archiver step. A simple workflow that invokes the archiver step configured to submit to DuraCloud as its only action is included in dataverse at /scripts/api/data/workflows/internal-archiver-workflow.json.

Using the Workflow Native API (see the Native API guide) this workflow can be installed using:

curl -X POST -H 'Content-type: application/json' --upload-file internal-archiver-workflow.json http://localhost:8080/api/admin/workflows

The workflow id returned in this call (or available by doing a GET of /api/admin/workflows ) can then be submitted as the default PostPublication workflow:

curl -X PUT -d {id} http://localhost:8080/api/admin/workflows/default/PostPublishDataset

Once these steps are taken, new publication requests will automatically trigger submission of an archival copy to the specified archiver, Chronopolis’ DuraCloud component in this example. For Chronopolis, as when using the API, it is currently the admin’s responsibility to snap-shot the DuraCloud space and monitor the result. Failure of the workflow, (e.g. if DuraCloud is unavailable, the configuration is wrong, or the space for this dataset already exists due to a prior publication action or use of the API), will create a failure message but will not affect publication itself.

Going Live: Launching Your Production Deployment

This guide has attempted to take you from kicking the tires on Dataverse to finalizing your installation before letting real users in. In theory, all this work could be done on a single server but better would be to have separate staging and production environments so that you can deploy upgrades to staging before deploying to production. This “Going Live” section is about launching your production environment.

Before going live with your installation of Dataverse, you must take the steps above under “Securing Your Installation” and you should at least review the various configuration options listed below. An attempt has been made to put the more commonly-configured options earlier in the list.

Out of the box, Dataverse attempts to block search engines from crawling your installation of Dataverse so that test datasets do not appear in search results until you’re ready.

Letting Search Engines Crawl Your Installation

Ensure robots.txt Is Not Blocking Search Engines

For a public production Dataverse installation, it is probably desired that search agents be able to index published pages (AKA - pages that are visible to an unauthenticated user). Polite crawlers usually respect the Robots Exclusion Standard; we have provided an example of a production robots.txt here).

We strongly recommend using the crawler rules in the sample robots.txt linked above. Note that they make the dataverse and dataset pages accessible to the search engine bots; but discourage them from actually crawling the site, by following any search links - facets and such - on the dataverse pages. Such crawling is very inefficient in terms of system resources, and often results in confusing search results for the end users of the search engines (for example, when partial search results are indexed as individual pages).

The recommended solution instead is to directly point the bots to the dataset and dataverse pages that need to be indexed, by advertising them via an explicit sitemap (please see the next section for details on how to generate the sitemap).

You can of course modify your own robots.txt to suit your specific needs as necessary. If you don’t want your datasets to be indexed at all, you can tell the bots to stay away from your site completely. But, as noted above, keep in mind that only the good, “polite” bots honor these rules! You are not really blocking anyone from accessing your site by adding a “Disallow” rule in robots.txt - it is a suggestion only. A rogue bot can and will violate it. If you are having trouble with the site being overloaded with what looks like heavy automated crawling, you may have to resort to blocking this traffic by other means - for example, via rewrite rules in Apache, or even by a Firewall.

(See the sample robots.txt file linked above for some comments on how to set up different “Allow” and “Disallow” rules for different crawler bots)

You have a couple of options for putting an updated robots.txt file into production. If you are fronting Payara with Apache as recommended above, you can place robots.txt in the root of the directory specified in your VirtualHost and to your Apache config a ProxyPassMatch line like the one below to prevent Payara from serving the version of robots.txt that is embedded in the Dataverse war file:

# don't let Payara serve its version of robots.txt
ProxyPassMatch ^/robots.txt$ !

For more of an explanation of ProxyPassMatch see the Shibboleth section.

If you are not fronting Payara with Apache you’ll need to prevent Payara from serving the robots.txt file embedded in the war file by overwriting robots.txt after the war file has been deployed. The downside of this technique is that you will have to remember to overwrite robots.txt in the “exploded” war file each time you deploy the war file, which probably means each time you upgrade to a new version of Dataverse. Furthermore, since the version of Dataverse is always incrementing and the version can be part of the file path, you will need to be conscious of where on disk you need to replace the file. For example, for Dataverse 4.6.1 the path to robots.txt may be /usr/local/payara5/glassfish/domains/domain1/applications/dataverse-4.6.1/robots.txt with the version number 4.6.1 as part of the path.

Creating a Sitemap and Submitting it to Search Engines

Search engines have an easier time indexing content when you provide them a sitemap. The Dataverse sitemap includes URLs to all published dataverses and all published datasets that are not harvested or deaccessioned.

Create or update your sitemap by adding the following curl command to cron to run nightly or as you see fit:

curl -X POST http://localhost:8080/api/admin/sitemap

This will create or update a file in the following location unless you have customized your installation directory for Payara:

/usr/local/payara5/glassfish/domains/domain1/docroot/sitemap/sitemap.xml

On an installation of Dataverse with many datasets, the creation or updating of the sitemap can take a while. You can check Payara’s server.log file for “BEGIN updateSiteMap” and “END updateSiteMap” lines to know when the process started and stopped and any errors in between.

https://demo.dataverse.org/sitemap.xml is the sitemap URL for the Dataverse Demo site and yours should be similar.

Once the sitemap has been generated and placed in the domain docroot directory, it will become available to the outside callers at <YOUR_SITE_URL>/sitemap/sitemap.xml; it will also be accessible at <YOUR_SITE_URL>/sitemap.xml (via a pretty-faces rewrite rule). Some search engines will be able to find it at this default location. Some, including Google, need to be specifically instructed to retrieve it.

One way to submit your sitemap URL to Google is by using their “Search Console” (https://search.google.com/search-console). In order to use the console, you will need to authenticate yourself as the owner of your Dataverse site. Various authentication methods are provided; but if you are already using Google Analytics, the easiest way is to use that account. Make sure you are logged in on Google with the account that has the edit permission on your Google Analytics property; go to the search console and enter the root URL of your Dataverse server, then choose Google Analytics as the authentication method. Once logged in, click on “Sitemaps” in the menu on the left. (todo: add a screenshot?) Consult Google’s “submit a sitemap” instructions for more information; and/or similar instructions for other search engines.

Putting Your Dataverse Installation on the Map at dataverse.org

Congratulations! You’ve gone live! It’s time to announce your new data repository to the world! You are also welcome to contact support@dataverse.org to have the Dataverse team add your installation to the map at http://dataverse.org . Thank you for installing Dataverse!

Administration of Your Dataverse Installation

Now that you’re live you’ll want to review the Admin Guide for more information about the ongoing administration of a Dataverse installation.

Setting Up Integrations

Before going live, you might want to consider setting up integrations to make it easier for your users to deposit or explore data. See the Integrations section of the Admin Guide for details.

JVM Options

JVM stands for Java Virtual Machine and as a Java application, Payara can read JVM options when it is started. A number of JVM options are configured by the installer below is a complete list of the Dataverse-specific JVM options. You can inspect the configured options by running:

./asadmin list-jvm-options | egrep 'dataverse|doi'

When changing values these values with asadmin, you’ll need to delete the old value before adding a new one, like this:

./asadmin delete-jvm-options "-Ddataverse.fqdn=old.example.com"

./asadmin create-jvm-options "-Ddataverse.fqdn=dataverse.example.com"

It’s also possible to change these values by stopping Payara, editing payara5/glassfish/domains/domain1/config/domain.xml, and restarting Payara.

dataverse.fqdn

If the Dataverse server has multiple DNS names, this option specifies the one to be used as the “official” host name. For example, you may want to have dataverse.example.edu, and not the less appealing server-123.socsci.example.edu to appear exclusively in all the registered global identifiers, Data Deposit API records, etc.

The password reset feature requires dataverse.fqdn to be configured.

Note

Do note that whenever the system needs to form a service URL, by default, it will be formed with https:// and port 443. I.e., https://{dataverse.fqdn}/ If that does not suit your setup, you can define an additional option, dataverse.siteUrl, explained below.

dataverse.siteUrl

Note

and specify the protocol and port number you would prefer to be used to advertise the URL for your Dataverse. For example, configured in domain.xml: <jvm-options>-Ddataverse.fqdn=dataverse.example.edu</jvm-options> <jvm-options>-Ddataverse.siteUrl=http://${dataverse.fqdn}:8080</jvm-options>

dataverse.files.directory

This is how you configure the path to which files uploaded by users are stored.

dataverse.auth.password-reset-timeout-in-minutes

Users have 60 minutes to change their passwords by default. You can adjust this value here.

dataverse.rserve.host

Configuration for TwoRavens.

dataverse.rserve.port

Configuration for TwoRavens.

dataverse.rserve.user

Configuration for TwoRavens.

dataverse.dropbox.key

Dropbox provides a Chooser app, which is a Javascript component that allows you to upload files to Dataverse from Dropbox. It is an optional configuration setting, which requires you to pass it an app key and configure the :UploadMethods database setting. For more information on setting up your Chooser app, visit https://www.dropbox.com/developers/chooser.

./asadmin create-jvm-options "-Ddataverse.dropbox.key={{YOUR_APP_KEY}}"

dataverse.path.imagemagick.convert

For overriding the default path to the convert binary from ImageMagick (/usr/bin/convert).

dataverse.dataAccess.thumbnail.image.limit

For limiting the size (in bytes) of thumbnail images generated from files.

dataverse.dataAccess.thumbnail.pdf.limit

For limiting the size (in bytes) of thumbnail images generated from files.

doi.baseurlstring

As of this writing, “https://mds.datacite.org” (DataCite) and “https://ezid.cdlib.org” (EZID) are the main valid values.

While the above two options are recommended because they have been tested by the Dataverse team, it is also possible to use a DataCite Client API as a proxy to DataCite. In this case, requests made to the Client API are captured and passed on to DataCite for processing. The application will interact with the DataCite Client API exactly as if it were interacting directly with the DataCite API, with the only difference being the change to the base endpoint URL.

For example, the Australian Data Archive (ADA) successfully uses the Australian National Data Service (ANDS) API (a proxy for DataCite) to mint their DOIs through Dataverse using a doi.baseurlstring value of “https://researchdata.ands.org.au/api/doi/datacite” as documented at https://documentation.ands.org.au/display/DOC/ANDS+DataCite+Client+API . As ADA did for ANDS DOI minting, any DOI provider (and their corresponding DOI configuration parameters) other than DataCite must be tested with Dataverse to establish whether or not it will function properly.

Out of the box, Dataverse is configured to use a test MDS DataCite base URL string. You can delete it like this:

./asadmin delete-jvm-options '-Ddoi.baseurlstring=https\://mds.test.datacite.org'

Then, to switch to production DataCite, you can issue the following command:

./asadmin create-jvm-options '-Ddoi.baseurlstring=https\://mds.datacite.org'

See also these related database settings below:

doi.dataciterestapiurlstring

This configuration option affects the updateCitationsForDataset API endpoint documented under Configuring Dataverse for Make Data Count Citations in the Admin Guide as well as the /pids/* API.

As of this writing, “https://api.datacite.org” (DataCite) and “https://api.test.datacite.org” (DataCite Testing) are the main valid values.

Out of the box, Dataverse is configured to use a test DataCite REST API base URL string. You can delete it like this:

./asadmin delete-jvm-options '-Ddoi.dataciterestapiurlstring=https\://api.test.datacite.org'

Then, to switch to production DataCite, you can issue the following command:

./asadmin create-jvm-options '-Ddoi.dataciterestapiurlstring=https\://api.datacite.org'

For backward compatibility, if this option is not defined, the value of ‘-Ddoi.mdcbaseurlstring’ is used if set. If not the default used is “https://api.datacite.org:.

See also these related database settings below:

doi.username

Used in conjuction with doi.baseurlstring.

Once you have a username from your provider, you can enter it like this:

./asadmin create-jvm-options '-Ddoi.username=YOUR_USERNAME_HERE'

doi.password

Used in conjuction with doi.baseurlstring.

Once you have a password from your provider, you can enter it like this:

./asadmin create-jvm-options '-Ddoi.password=YOUR_PASSWORD_HERE'

dataverse.handlenet.admcredfile

If you’re using handles, this JVM setting configures access credentials so your dataverse can talk to your Handle.Net server. This is the private key generated during Handle.Net server installation. Typically the full path is set to handle/svr_1/admpriv.bin. Please refer to Handle.Net’s documentation for more info.

dataverse.handlenet.admprivphrase

This JVM setting is also part of handles configuration. The Handle.Net installer lets you choose whether to encrypt the admcredfile private key or not. If you do encrypt it, this is the pass phrase that it’s encrypted with.

dataverse.handlenet.index

If you want to use different index than the default 300

dataverse.timerServer

This JVM option is only relevant if you plan to run multiple Payara servers for redundancy. Only one Payara server can act as the dedicated timer server and for details on promoting or demoting a Payara server to handle this responsibility, see Dataverse Application Timers.

dataverse.lang.directory

This JVM option is used to configure the path where all the language specific property files are to be stored. If this option is set then the English property file must be present in the path along with any other language property file. You can download language property files from https://github.com/GlobalDataverseCommunityConsortium/dataverse-language-packs

./asadmin create-jvm-options '-Ddataverse.lang.directory=PATH_LOCATION_HERE'

If this value is not set, by default, a Dataverse installation will read the English language property files from the Java Application.

See also Internationalization.

dataverse.files.hide-schema-dot-org-download-urls

Please note that this setting is experimental.

By default, download URLs to files will be included in Schema.org JSON-LD output. To prevent these URLs from being included in the output, set dataverse.files.hide-schema-dot-org-download-urls to true as in the example below.

./asadmin create-jvm-options '-Ddataverse.files.hide-schema-dot-org-download-urls=true'

Please note that there are other reasons why download URLs may not be included for certain files such as if a guestbook entry is required or if the file is restricted.

For more on Schema.org JSON-LD, see the Metadata Export section of the Admin Guide.

dataverse.useripaddresssourceheader

Make sure to read the section about the Security Implications of using this option earlier in the guide!

If set, specifies an HTTP Header such as X-Forwarded-For to use to retrieve the user’s IP address. For example:

./asadmin create-jvm-options '-Ddataverse.useripaddresssourceheader=X-Forwarded-For'

This setting is useful in cases such as running Dataverse behind load balancers where the default option of getting the Remote Address from the servlet isn’t correct (e.g. it would be the load balancer IP address). Note that unless your installation always sets the header you configure here, this could be used as a way to spoof the user’s address. Allowed values are:

"X-Forwarded-For",
"Proxy-Client-IP",
"WL-Proxy-Client-IP",
"HTTP_X_FORWARDED_FOR",
"HTTP_X_FORWARDED",
"HTTP_X_CLUSTER_CLIENT_IP",
"HTTP_CLIENT_IP",
"HTTP_FORWARDED_FOR",
"HTTP_FORWARDED",
"HTTP_VIA",
"REMOTE_ADDR"

Application Server Settings

http.request-timeout-seconds

To facilitate large file upload and download, the Dataverse installer bumps the Payara server-config.network-config.protocols.protocol.http-listener-1.http.request-timeout-seconds setting from its default 900 seconds (15 minutes) to 1800 (30 minutes). Should you wish to shorten or lengthen this window, issue for example:

./asadmin set server-config.network-config.protocols.protocol.http-listener-1.http.request-timeout-seconds=3600

and restart Payara to apply your change.

Database Settings

These settings are stored in the setting database table but can be read and modified via the “admin” endpoint of the Native API for easy scripting.

The most commonly used configuration options are listed first.

The pattern you will observe in curl examples below is that an HTTP PUT is used to add or modify a setting. If you perform an HTTP GET (the default when using curl), the output will contain the value of the setting, if it has been set. You can also do a GET of all settings with curl http://localhost:8080/api/admin/settings which you may want to pretty-print by piping the output through a tool such as jq by appending | jq .. If you want to remove a setting, use an HTTP DELETE such as curl -X DELETE http://localhost:8080/api/admin/settings/:GuidesBaseUrl .

:BlockedApiPolicy

:BlockedApiPolicy affects access to the list of API endpoints defined in :BlockedApiEndpoints.

Out of the box, localhost-only is the default policy, as mentioned in Blocking API Endpoints. The other valid options are the following.

  • localhost-only: Allow from localhost.
  • unblock-key: Require a key defined in :BlockedApiKey.
  • drop: Disallow the blocked endpoints completely.

Below is an example of setting localhost-only.

curl -X PUT -d localhost-only http://localhost:8080/api/admin/settings/:BlockedApiPolicy

:BlockedApiEndpoints

A comma separated list of API endpoints to be blocked. For a production installation, “admin” should be blocked (and perhaps “builtin-users” as well), as mentioned in the section on security above:

curl -X PUT -d "admin,builtin-users" http://localhost:8080/api/admin/settings/:BlockedApiEndpoints

See the Lists of Dataverse APIs for lists of API endpoints.

:BlockedApiKey

:BlockedApiKey is used in conjunction with :BlockedApiEndpoints and :BlockedApiPolicy and will not be enabled unless the policy is set to unblock-key as demonstrated below. Please note that the order is significant. You should set :BlockedApiKey first to prevent locking yourself out.

curl -X PUT -d s3kretKey http://localhost:8080/api/admin/settings/:BlockedApiKey

curl -X PUT -d unblock-key http://localhost:8080/api/admin/settings/:BlockedApiPolicy

Now that :BlockedApiKey has been enabled, blocked APIs can be accessed using the query parameter unblock-key=theKeyYouChose as in the example below.

curl https://demo.dataverse.org/api/admin/settings?unblock-key=theKeyYouChose

BuiltinUsers.KEY

The key required to create users via API as documented at Native API. Unlike other database settings, this one doesn’t start with a colon.

curl -X PUT -d builtInS3kretKey http://localhost:8080/api/admin/settings/BuiltinUsers.KEY

:SearchApiRequiresToken

In Dataverse 4.7 and lower, the Search API required an API token, but as of Dataverse 4.7.1 this is no longer the case. If you prefer the old behavior of requiring API tokens to use the Search API, set :SearchApiRequiresToken to true.

curl -X PUT -d true http://localhost:8080/api/admin/settings/:SearchApiRequiresToken

:SystemEmail

This is the email address that “system” emails are sent from such as password reset links. Your Dataverse installation will not send mail without this setting in place.

curl -X PUT -d 'LibraScholar SWAT Team <support@librascholar.edu>' http://localhost:8080/api/admin/settings/:SystemEmail

Note that only the email address is required, which you can supply without the < and > signs, but if you include the text, it’s the way to customize the name of your support team, which appears in the “from” address in emails as well as in help text in the UI.

Please note that if you’re having any trouble sending email, you can refer to “Troubleshooting” under Installation.

:FooterCopyright

By default the footer says “Copyright © [YYYY]” but you can add text after the year, as in the example below.

curl -X PUT -d ", Your Institution" http://localhost:8080/api/admin/settings/:FooterCopyright

:DoiProvider

As of this writing “DataCite” and “EZID” are the only valid options for production installations. Developers using version 4.10 and above are welcome to use the keyword “FAKE” to configure a non-production installation with an non-resolving, in-code provider, which will basically short-circuit the DOI publishing process. :DoiProvider is only needed if you are using DOI.

curl -X PUT -d DataCite http://localhost:8080/api/admin/settings/:DoiProvider

This setting relates to the :Protocol, :Authority, :Shoulder, and :IdentifierGenerationStyle database settings below as well as the following JVM options:

:Protocol

As of this writing “doi” and “hdl” are the only valid option for the protocol for a persistent ID.

curl -X PUT -d doi http://localhost:8080/api/admin/settings/:Protocol

:Authority

Use the authority assigned to you by your DoiProvider or HandleProvider.

Please note that the authority cannot have a slash (“/”) in it.

curl -X PUT -d 10.xxxx http://localhost:8080/api/admin/settings/:Authority

:Shoulder

Out of the box, the DOI shoulder is set to “FK2/” but this is for testing only! When you apply for your DOI namespace, you may have requested a shoulder. The following is only an example and a trailing slash is optional.

curl -X PUT -d "MyShoulder/" http://localhost:8080/api/admin/settings/:Shoulder

:IdentifierGenerationStyle

By default, Dataverse generates a random 6 character string, pre-pended by the Shoulder if set, to use as the identifier for a Dataset. Set this to sequentialNumber to use sequential numeric values instead (again pre-pended by the Shoulder if set). (the assumed default setting is randomString). In addition to this setting, a database sequence must be created in the database. We provide the script below (downloadable here). You may need to make some changes to suit your system setup, see the comments for more information:

-- A script for creating a numeric identifier sequence, and an external 
-- stored procedure, for accessing the sequence from inside the application, 
-- in a non-hacky, JPA way. 

-- NOTE:

-- 1. The database user name "dvnapp" is hard-coded here - it may
-- need to be changed to match your database user name;
  
-- 2. In the code below, the sequence starts with 1, but it can be adjusted by
-- changing the MINVALUE as needed. 

CREATE SEQUENCE datasetidentifier_seq
  INCREMENT 1
  MINVALUE 1
  MAXVALUE 9223372036854775807
  START 1
CACHE 1;

ALTER TABLE datasetidentifier_seq OWNER TO "dvnapp";

-- And now create a PostgreSQL FUNCTION, for JPA to
-- access as a NamedStoredProcedure:

CREATE OR REPLACE FUNCTION generateIdentifierAsSequentialNumber(
    OUT identifier int)
  RETURNS int AS
$BODY$
BEGIN
    select nextval('datasetidentifier_seq') into identifier;
END;
$BODY$
  LANGUAGE plpgsql;

Note that the SQL above is Postgres-specific. If necessary, it can be reimplemented in any other SQL flavor - the standard JPA code in the application simply expects the database to have a saved function (“stored procedure”) named generateIdentifierAsSequentialNumber with the single return argument identifier.

Please note that :IdentifierGenerationStyle also plays a role for the “identifier” for files. See the section on :DataFilePIDFormat below for more details.

:DataFilePIDFormat

This setting controls the way that the “identifier” component of a file’s persistent identifier (PID) relates to the PID of its “parent” dataset.

By default the identifier for a file is dependent on its parent dataset. For example, if the identifier of a dataset is “TJCLKP”, the identifier for a file within that dataset will consist of the parent dataset’s identifier followed by a slash (“/”), followed by a random 6 character string, yielding “TJCLKP/MLGWJO”. Identifiers in this format are what you should expect if you leave :DataFilePIDFormat undefined or set it to DEPENDENT and have not changed the :IdentifierGenerationStyle setting from its default.

Alternatively, the identifier for File PIDs can be configured to be independent of Dataset PIDs using the setting “INDEPENDENT”. In this case, file PIDs will not contain the PIDs of their parent datasets, and their PIDs will be generated the exact same way that datasets’ PIDs are, based on the :IdentifierGenerationStyle setting described above (random 6 character strings or sequential numbers, pre-pended by any shoulder).

The chart below shows examples from each possible combination of parameters from the two settings. :IdentifierGenerationStyle can be either randomString (the default) or sequentialNumber and :DataFilePIDFormat can be either DEPENDENT (the default) or INDEPENDENT. In the examples below the “identifier” for the dataset is “TJCLKP” for “randomString” and “100001” for “sequentialNumber”.

  randomString sequentialNumber
DEPENDENT TJCLKP/MLGWJO 100001/1
INDEPENDENT MLGWJO 100002

As seen above, in cases where :IdentifierGenerationStyle is set to sequentialNumber and :DataFilePIDFormat is set to DEPENDENT, each file within a dataset will be assigned a number within that dataset starting with “1”.

Otherwise, if :DataFilePIDFormat is set to INDEPENDENT, then each file will be assigned a PID with the next number in the overall sequence, regardless of what dataset it is in. If the file is created after a dataset with the PID 100001, then the file will be assigned the PID 100002. This option is functional, but it is not a recommended use case.

Note that in either case, when using the sequentialNumber option, datasets and files share the same database sequence that was created as part of the setup described in :IdentifierGenerationStyle above.

:FilePIDsEnabled

Toggles publishing of file-based PIDs for the entire installation. By default this setting is absent and Dataverse assumes it to be true. If enabled, the registration will be performed asynchronously (in the background) during publishing of a dataset.

If you don’t want to register file-based PIDs for your installation, set:

curl -X PUT -d 'false' http://localhost:8080/api/admin/settings/:FilePIDsEnabled

Note: File-level PID registration was added in 4.9; it could not be disabled until version 4.9.3.

:IndependentHandleService

Specific for Handle PIDs. Set this setting to true if you want to use a Handle service which is setup to work ‘independently’ (No communication with the Global Handle Registry). By default this setting is absent and Dataverse assumes it to be false.

curl -X PUT -d 'true' http://localhost:8080/api/admin/settings/:IndependentHandleService

:FileValidationOnPublishEnabled

Toggles validation of the physical files in the dataset when it’s published, by recalculating the checksums and comparing against the values stored in the DataFile table. By default this setting is absent and Dataverse assumes it to be true. If enabled, the validation will be performed asynchronously, similarly to how we handle assigning persistent identifiers to datafiles, with the dataset locked for the duration of the publishing process.

If you don’t want the datafiles to be validated on publish, set:

curl -X PUT -d 'false' http://localhost:8080/api/admin/settings/:FileValidationOnPublishEnabled

:ApplicationTermsOfUse

Upload an default language HTML file containing the Terms of Use to be displayed at sign up. Supported HTML tags are listed under the Dataset + File Management section of the User Guide.

curl -X PUT -d@/tmp/apptou.html http://localhost:8080/api/admin/settings/:ApplicationTermsOfUse

To upload a language specific Terms of Use file,

curl -X PUT -d@/tmp/apptou_fr.html http://localhost:8080/api/admin/settings/:ApplicationTermsOfUse/lang/fr

To delete language specific option,

curl -X DELETE http://localhost:8080/api/admin/settings/:ApplicationTermsOfUse/lang/fr

:ApplicationPrivacyPolicyUrl

Specify a URL where users can read your Privacy Policy, linked from the bottom of the page.

curl -X PUT -d https://dataverse.org/best-practices/harvard-dataverse-privacy-policy http://localhost:8080/api/admin/settings/:ApplicationPrivacyPolicyUrl

:ApiTermsOfUse

Specify a URL where users can read your API Terms of Use. API users can retrieve this URL from the SWORD Service Document or the Info section of our Native API documentation.

curl -X PUT -d https://dataverse.org/best-practices/harvard-api-tou http://localhost:8080/api/admin/settings/:ApiTermsOfUse

:ExcludeEmailFromExport

See also Privacy Considerations above.

Set :ExcludeEmailFromExport to prevent email addresses for contacts from being exposed in XML or JSON representations of dataset and dataverse metadata. For a list exported formats such as DDI, see the Metadata Export section of the Admin Guide.

curl -X PUT -d true http://localhost:8080/api/admin/settings/:ExcludeEmailFromExport

Note: After making a change to this setting, a reExportAll needs to be run before the changes will be reflected in the exports:

curl http://localhost:8080/api/admin/metadata/reExportAll

This will force a re-export of every published, local dataset, regardless of whether it has already been exported or not.

:GuidesBaseUrl

Set GuidesBaseUrl to override the default value “http://guides.dataverse.org”. If you are interested in writing your own version of the guides, you may find the Writing Documentation section of the Developer Guide helpful.

curl -X PUT -d http://dataverse.example.edu http://localhost:8080/api/admin/settings/:GuidesBaseUrl

:GuidesVersion

Set :GuidesVersion to override the version number in the URL of guides. For example, rather than http://guides.dataverse.org/en/4.6/user/account.html the version is overriden to http://guides.dataverse.org/en/1234-new-feature/user/account.html in the example below:

curl -X PUT -d 1234-new-feature http://localhost:8080/api/admin/settings/:GuidesVersion

:MetricsUrl

Make the metrics component on the root dataverse a clickable link to a website where you present metrics on your Dataverse installation, perhaps one of the community-supported tools mentioned in the Reporting Tools and Common Queries section of the Admin Guide.

curl -X PUT -d http://metrics.dataverse.example.edu http://localhost:8080/api/admin/settings/:MetricsUrl

:StatusMessageHeader

For dynamically adding an informational header to the top of every page. StatusMessageText must also be set for a message to show. For example, “For testing only...” at the top of https://demo.dataverse.org is set with this:

curl -X PUT -d "For testing only..." http://localhost:8080/api/admin/settings/:StatusMessageHeader

You can make the text clickable and include an additional message in a pop up by setting :StatusMessageText.

:StatusMessageText

Alongside the :StatusMessageHeader you need to add StatusMessageText for the message to show.:

curl -X PUT -d "This appears in a popup." http://localhost:8080/api/admin/settings/:StatusMessageText

:MaxFileUploadSizeInBytes

This setting controls the maximum size of uploaded files. - To have one limit for all stores, set MaxFileUploadSizeInBytes to “2147483648”, for example, to limit the size of files uploaded to 2 GB:

curl -X PUT -d 2147483648 http://localhost:8080/api/admin/settings/:MaxFileUploadSizeInBytes

  • To have limits per store with an optional default, use a serialized json object for the value of MaxFileUploadSizeInBytes with an entry per store, as in the following example, which maintains a 2 GB default and adds higher limits for stores with ids “fileOne” and “s3”.

curl -X PUT -d '{"default":"2147483648","fileOne":"4000000000","s3":"8000000000"}' http://localhost:8080/api/admin/settings/:MaxFileUploadSizeInBytes

Notes:

  • For SWORD, this size is limited by the Java Integer.MAX_VALUE of 2,147,483,647. (see: https://github.com/IQSS/dataverse/issues/2169)
  • If the MaxFileUploadSizeInBytes is NOT set, uploads, including SWORD may be of unlimited size.
  • For larger file upload sizes, you may need to configure your reverse proxy timeout. If using apache2 (httpd) with Shibboleth, add a timeout to the ProxyPass defined in etc/httpd/conf.d/ssl.conf (which is described in the Shibboleth setup).

:ZipDownloadLimit

For performance reasons, Dataverse will only create zip files on the fly up to 100 MB but the limit can be increased. Here’s an example of raising the limit to 1 GB:

curl -X PUT -d 1000000000 http://localhost:8080/api/admin/settings/:ZipDownloadLimit

:TabularIngestSizeLimit

Threshold in bytes for limiting whether or not “ingest” it attempted for tabular files (which can be resource intensive). For example, with the below in place, files greater than 2 GB in size will not go through the ingest process:

curl -X PUT -d 2000000000 http://localhost:8080/api/admin/settings/:TabularIngestSizeLimit

(You can set this value to 0 to prevent files from being ingested at all.)

You can override this global setting on a per-format basis for the following formats:

  • DTA
  • POR
  • SAV
  • Rdata
  • CSV
  • XLSX

For example, if you want your installation of Dataverse to not attempt to ingest Rdata files larger than 1 MB, use this setting:

curl -X PUT -d 1000000 http://localhost:8080/api/admin/settings/:TabularIngestSizeLimit:Rdata

:ZipUploadFilesLimit

Limit the number of files in a zip that Dataverse will accept.

:SolrHostColonPort

By default Dataverse will attempt to connect to Solr on port 8983 on localhost. Use this setting to change the hostname or port. You must restart Payara after making this change.

curl -X PUT -d localhost:8983 http://localhost:8080/api/admin/settings/:SolrHostColonPort

:SolrFullTextIndexing

Whether or not to index the content of files such as PDFs. The default is false.

curl -X PUT -d true http://localhost:8080/api/admin/settings/:SolrFullTextIndexing

:SolrMaxFileSizeForFullTextIndexing

If :SolrFullTextIndexing is set to true, the content of files of any size will be indexed. To set a limit in bytes for which files to index in this way:

curl -X PUT -d 314572800 http://localhost:8080/api/admin/settings/:SolrMaxFileSizeForFullTextIndexing

:SignUpUrl

The relative path URL to which users will be sent for signup. The default setting is below.

curl -X PUT -d '/dataverseuser.xhtml?editMode=CREATE' http://localhost:8080/api/admin/settings/:SignUpUrl

:LoginSessionTimeout

Session timeout (in minutes) for logged-in users. The default is 8 hours (480 minutes). For the anonymous user sessions, the timeout is set to the default value, configured in the web.xml file of the Dataverse application.

In the example below we reduce the timeout to 4 hours:

curl -X PUT -d 240 http://localhost:8080/api/admin/settings/:LoginSessionTimeout

:TwoRavensUrl

The :TwoRavensUrl option is no longer valid. See TwoRavens and the External Tools section of the Admin Guide.

:TwoRavensTabularView

The :TwoRavensTabularView option is no longer valid. See TwoRavens and the External Tools section of the Admin Guide.

:GeoconnectCreateEditMaps

Set GeoconnectCreateEditMaps to true to allow the user to create GeoConnect Maps. This boolean effects whether the user sees the map button on the dataset page and if the ingest will create a shape file.

curl -X PUT -d true http://localhost:8080/api/admin/settings/:GeoconnectCreateEditMaps

:GeoconnectViewMaps

Set GeoconnectViewMaps to true to allow a user to view existing maps. This boolean effects whether a user will see the “Explore” button.

curl -X PUT -d true http://localhost:8080/api/admin/settings/:GeoconnectViewMaps

:DatasetPublishPopupCustomText

Set custom text a user will view when publishing a dataset. Note that this text is exposed via the “Info” endpoint of the Native API.

curl -X PUT -d "Deposit License Requirements" http://localhost:8080/api/admin/settings/:DatasetPublishPopupCustomText

If you have a long text string, you can upload it as a file as in the example below.

curl -X PUT --upload-file /tmp/long.txt http://localhost:8080/api/admin/settings/:DatasetPublishPopupCustomText

:DatasetPublishPopupCustomTextOnAllVersions

Set whether a user will see the custom text when publishing all versions of a dataset

curl -X PUT -d true http://localhost:8080/api/admin/settings/:DatasetPublishPopupCustomTextOnAllVersions

:SearchHighlightFragmentSize

Set SearchHighlightFragmentSize to override the default value of 100 from https://wiki.apache.org/solr/HighlightingParameters#hl.fragsize . In practice, a value of “320” seemed to fix the issue at https://github.com/IQSS/dataverse/issues/2191

curl -X PUT -d 320 http://localhost:8080/api/admin/settings/:SearchHighlightFragmentSize

:ScrubMigrationData

Allow for migration of non-conformant data (especially dates) from DVN 3.x to Dataverse 4.

:MinutesUntilConfirmEmailTokenExpires

The duration in minutes before “Confirm Email” URLs expire. The default is 1440 minutes (24 hours). See also the User Administration section of our Admin Guide.

:DefaultAuthProvider

If you have enabled Shibboleth and/or one or more OAuth providers, you may wish to make one of these authentication providers the default when users visit the Log In page. If unset, this will default to builtin but these valid options (depending if you’ve done the setup described in the Shibboleth or OAuth Login Options sections) are:

  • builtin
  • shib
  • orcid
  • github
  • google

Here is an example of setting the default auth provider back to builtin:

curl -X PUT -d builtin http://localhost:8080/api/admin/settings/:DefaultAuthProvider

:AllowSignUp

Set to false to disallow local accounts to be created. See also the sections on Shibboleth and OAuth Login Options.

:FileFixityChecksumAlgorithm

Dataverse calculates checksums for uploaded files so that users can determine if their file was corrupted via upload or download. This is sometimes called “file fixity”: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File_Fixity

The default checksum algorithm used is MD5 and should be sufficient for establishing file fixity. “SHA-1”, “SHA-256” and “SHA-512” are alternate values for this setting. For example:

curl -X PUT -d 'SHA-512' http://localhost:8080/api/admin/settings/:FileFixityChecksumAlgorithm

The fixity algorithm used on existing files can be changed by a superuser using the API. An optional query parameter (num) can be used to limit the number of updates attempted. The API call will only update the algorithm and checksum for a file if the existing checksum can be validated against the file. Statistics concerning the updates are returned in the response to the API call with details in the log.

curl http://localhost:8080/api/admin/updateHashValues/{alg} curl http://localhost:8080/api/admin/updateHashValues/{alg}?num=1

:PVMinLength

Password policy setting for builtin user accounts: a password’s minimum valid character length. The default is 6.

curl -X PUT -d 6 http://localhost:8080/api/admin/settings/:PVMinLength

:PVMaxLength

Password policy setting for builtin user accounts: a password’s maximum valid character length.

curl -X PUT -d 0 http://localhost:8080/api/admin/settings/:PVMaxLength

:PVNumberOfConsecutiveDigitsAllowed

By default, passwords can contain an unlimited number of digits in a row. However, if your password policy specifies otherwise (e.g. only four digits in a row are allowed), then you can issue the following curl command to set the number of consecutive digits allowed (this example uses 4):

curl -X PUT -d 4 http://localhost:8080/api/admin/settings/:PVNumberOfConsecutiveDigitsAllowed

:PVCharacterRules

Password policy setting for builtinuser accounts: dictates which types of characters can be required in a password. This setting goes hand-in-hand with :PVNumberOfCharacteristics. The default setting contains two rules:

  • one letter
  • one digit

The default setting above is equivalent to specifying “Alphabetical:1,Digit:1”.

By specifying “UpperCase:1,LowerCase:1,Digit:1,Special:1”, for example, you can put the following four rules in place instead:

  • one uppercase letter
  • one lowercase letter
  • one digit
  • one special character

If you have implemented 4 different character rules in this way, you can also optionally increase :PVNumberOfCharacteristics to as high as 4. However, please note that :PVNumberOfCharacteristics cannot be set to a number higher than the number of character rules or you will see the error, “Number of characteristics must be <= to the number of rules”.

Also note that the Alphabetical setting should not be used in tandem with the UpperCase or LowerCase settings. The Alphabetical setting encompasses both of those more specific settings, so using it with them will cause your password policy to be unnecessarily confusing, and potentially easier to bypass.

curl -X PUT -d 'UpperCase:1,LowerCase:1,Digit:1,Special:1' http://localhost:8080/api/admin/settings/:PVCharacterRules

curl -X PUT -d 3 http://localhost:8080/api/admin/settings/:PVNumberOfCharacteristics

:PVNumberOfCharacteristics

Password policy setting for builtin user accounts: the number indicates how many of the character rules defined by :PVCharacterRules are required as part of a password. The default is 2. :PVNumberOfCharacteristics cannot be set to a number higher than the number of rules or you will see the error, “Number of characteristics must be <= to the number of rules”.

curl -X PUT -d 2 http://localhost:8080/api/admin/settings/:PVNumberOfCharacteristics

:PVDictionaries

Password policy setting for builtin user accounts: set a comma separated list of dictionaries containing words that cannot be used in a user password. /usr/share/dict/words is suggested and shown modified below to not contain words 3 letters or less. You are free to choose a different dictionary. By default, no dictionary is checked.

DIR=THE_PATH_YOU_WANT_YOUR_DICTIONARY_TO_RESIDE sed '/^.\{,3\}$/d' /usr/share/dict/words > $DIR/pwdictionary curl -X PUT -d "$DIR/pwdictionary" http://localhost:8080/api/admin/settings/:PVDictionaries

:PVGoodStrength

Password policy setting for builtin user accounts: passwords of equal or greater character length than the :PVGoodStrength setting are always valid, regardless of other password constraints.

curl -X PUT -d 20 http://localhost:8080/api/admin/settings/:PVGoodStrength

Recommended setting: 20.

:PVCustomPasswordResetAlertMessage

Changes the default info message displayed when a user is required to change their password on login. The default is:

{0} Reset Password{1} Our password requirements have changed. Please pick a strong password that matches the criteria below.

Where the {0} and {1} denote surrounding HTML bold tags. It’s recommended to put a single space before your custom message for better appearance (as in the default message above). Including the {0} and {1} to bolden part of your message is optional.

Customize the message using the following curl command’s syntax:

curl -X PUT -d '{0} Action Required:{1} Your current password does not meet all requirements. Please enter a new password meeting the criteria below.' http://localhost:8080/api/admin/settings/:PVCustomPasswordResetAlertMessage

:ShibPassiveLoginEnabled

Set :ShibPassiveLoginEnabled to true to enable passive login for Shibboleth. When this feature is enabled, an additional Javascript file (isPassive.js) will be loaded for every page. It will generate a passive login request to your Shibboleth SP when an anonymous user navigates to the site. A cookie named “_check_is_passive_dv” will be created to keep track of whether or not a passive login request has already been made for the user.

This implementation follows the example on the Shibboleth wiki documentation page for the isPassive feature: https://wiki.shibboleth.net/confluence/display/SHIB2/isPassive

It is recommended that you configure additional error handling for your Service Provider if you enable passive login. A good way of doing this is described in the Shibboleth wiki documentation:

  • In your Service Provider 2.x shibboleth2.xml file, add redirectErrors=”#THIS PAGE#” to the Errors element.

You can set the value of “#THIS PAGE#” to the URL of your Dataverse homepage, or any other page on your site that is accessible to anonymous users and will have the isPassive.js file loaded.

curl -X PUT -d true http://localhost:8080/api/admin/settings/:ShibPassiveLoginEnabled

:ShibAffiliationAttribute

The Shibboleth affiliation attribute holds information about the affiliation of the user (e.g. “OU”) and is read from the DiscoFeed at each login. :ShibAffiliationAttribute is a name of a Shibboleth attribute in the Shibboleth header which Dataverse will read from instead of DiscoFeed. If this value is not set or empty, Dataverse uses the DiscoFeed.

If the attribute is not yet set for the Shibboleth, please consult the Shibboleth Administrators at your institution. Typically it requires changing of the /etc/shibboleth/attribute-map.xml file by adding an attribute request, e.g.

<Attribute name="urn:oid:2.5.4.11" id="ou">
    <AttributeDecoder xsi:type="StringAttributeDecoder" caseSensitive="false"/>
</Attribute>

In order to implement the change, you should restart Shibboleth and Apache2 services:

sudo service shibd restart
sudo service apache2 restart

To check if the attribute is sent, you should log in again to Dataverse and check Shibboleth’s transaction log. You should see something like this:

INFO Shibboleth-TRANSACTION [25]: Cached the following attributes with session (ID: _9d1f34c0733b61c0feb0ca7596ef43b2) for (applicationId: default) {
INFO Shibboleth-TRANSACTION [25]:       givenName (1 values)
INFO Shibboleth-TRANSACTION [25]:       ou (1 values)
INFO Shibboleth-TRANSACTION [25]:       sn (1 values)
INFO Shibboleth-TRANSACTION [25]:       eppn (1 values)
INFO Shibboleth-TRANSACTION [25]:       mail (1 values)
INFO Shibboleth-TRANSACTION [25]:       displayName (1 values)
INFO Shibboleth-TRANSACTION [25]: }

If you see the attribue you requested in this list, you can set the attribute in Dataverse.

To set :ShibAffiliationAttribute:

curl -X PUT -d "ou" http://localhost:8080/api/admin/settings/:ShibAffiliationAttribute

To delete :ShibAffiliationAttribute:

curl -X DELETE http://localhost:8080/api/admin/settings/:ShibAffiliationAttribute

To check the current value of :ShibAffiliationAttribute:

curl -X GET http://localhost:8080/api/admin/settings/:ShibAffiliationAttribute

:ShibAttributeCharacterSetConversionEnabled

It seems that the application server (usually Glassfish or Payara) will interpret all Shibboleth attributes that come through AJP as ISO-8859-1, even if they where originally UTF-8. To circumvent that, we re-encode all received Shibboleth attributes manually as UTF-8 by default. In the case you get garbled characters in Shibboleth-supplied fields (e.g. given name, surname, affiliation), you can disable this behaviour by setting ShibAttributeCharacterSetConversionEnabled to false:

curl -X PUT -d false http://localhost:8080/api/admin/settings/:ShibAttributeCharacterSetConversionEnabled

If you managed to get correct accented characters from shibboleth while this setting is _false_, please contact us with your application server and Shibboleth configuration!

:ComputeBaseUrl

Set the base URL for the “Compute” button for a dataset.

curl -X PUT -d 'https://giji.massopencloud.org/application/dataverse' http://localhost:8080/api/admin/settings/:ComputeBaseUrl

:CloudEnvironmentName

Set the name of the cloud environment you’ve integrated with your Dataverse installation.

curl -X PUT -d 'Massachusetts Open Cloud (MOC)' http://localhost:8080/api/admin/settings/:CloudEnvironmentName

:PublicInstall

Setting an installation to public will remove the ability to restrict data files or datasets. This functionality of Dataverse will be disabled from your installation.

This is useful for specific cases where an installation’s files are stored in public access. Because files stored this way do not obey Dataverse’s file restrictions, users would still be able to access the files even when they’re restricted. In these cases it’s best to use :PublicInstall to disable the feature altogether.

curl -X PUT -d true http://localhost:8080/api/admin/settings/:PublicInstall

:DataCaptureModuleUrl

The URL for your Data Capture Module (DCM) installation. This component is experimental and can be downloaded from https://github.com/sbgrid/data-capture-module .

curl -X PUT -d 'https://dcm.example.edu' http://localhost:8080/api/admin/settings/:DataCaptureModuleUrl

:RepositoryStorageAbstractionLayerUrl

The URL for your Repository Storage Abstraction Layer (RSAL) installation. This component is experimental and can be downloaded from https://github.com/sbgrid/rsal .

curl -X PUT -d 'https://rsal.example.edu' http://localhost:8080/api/admin/settings/:RepositoryStorageAbstractionLayerUrl

:UploadMethods

This setting controls which upload methods are available to users of your installation of Dataverse. The following upload methods are available:

  • native/http: Corresponds to “Upload with HTTP via your browser” and APIs that use HTTP (SWORD and native).
  • dcm/rsync+ssh: Corresponds to “Upload with rsync+ssh via Data Capture Module (DCM)”. A lot of setup is required, as explained in the Big Data Support section of the Developer Guide.

Out of the box only native/http is enabled and will work without further configuration. To add multiple upload method, separate them using a comma like this:

curl -X PUT -d 'native/http,dcm/rsync+ssh' http://localhost:8080/api/admin/settings/:UploadMethods

You’ll always want at least one upload method, so the easiest way to remove one of them is to simply PUT just the one you want, like this:

curl -X PUT -d 'native/http' http://localhost:8080/api/admin/settings/:UploadMethods

:DownloadMethods

This setting is experimental and related to Repository Storage Abstraction Layer (RSAL).

curl -X PUT -d 'rsal/rsync' http://localhost:8080/api/admin/settings/:DownloadMethods

:GuestbookResponsesPageDisplayLimit

Limit on how many guestbook entries to display on the guestbook-responses page. By default, only the 5000 most recent entries will be shown. Use the standard settings API in order to change the limit. For example, to set it to 10,000, make the following API call:

curl -X PUT -d 10000 http://localhost:8080/api/admin/settings/:GuestbookResponsesPageDisplayLimit

:CustomDatasetSummaryFields

You can replace the default dataset metadata fields that are displayed above files table on the dataset page with a custom list separated by commas using the curl command below.

curl http://localhost:8080/api/admin/settings/:CustomDatasetSummaryFields -X PUT -d 'producer,subtitle,alternativeTitle'

You have to put the datasetFieldType name attribute in the :CustomDatasetSummaryFields setting for this to work.

:AllowApiTokenLookupViaApi

Dataverse 4.8.1 and below allowed API Token lookup via API but for better security this has been disabled by default. Set this to true if you really want the old behavior.

curl -X PUT -d 'true' http://localhost:8080/api/admin/settings/:AllowApiTokenLookupViaApi

:ProvCollectionEnabled

Enable the collection of provenance metadata on Dataverse via the provenance popup.

curl -X PUT -d 'true' http://localhost:8080/api/admin/settings/:ProvCollectionEnabled

:MetricsCacheTimeoutMinutes

Sets how long a cached metrics result is used before re-running the query for a request. This timeout is only applied to some of the metrics that query the current state of the system, previous months queries are cached indefinitely. See Metrics API for more info. The default timeout value is 7 days (10080 minutes).

curl -X PUT -d 10080 http://localhost:8080/api/admin/settings/:MetricsCacheTimeoutMinutes

:MDCLogPath

Sets the path where the raw Make Data Count logs are stored before being processed. If not set, no logs will be created for Make Data Count. See also the Make Data Count section of the Admin Guide.

curl -X PUT -d '/usr/local/payara5/glassfish/domains/domain1/logs' http://localhost:8080/api/admin/settings/:MDCLogPath

:DisplayMDCMetrics

:DisplayMDCMetrics can be set to false to disable display of MDC metrics (e.g. to enable collection of MDC metrics for some period prior to completing the set-up of Counter and performing the other steps described in the Make Data Count section of the Admin Guide).

curl -X PUT -d 'false' http://localhost:8080/api/admin/settings/:DisplayMDCMetrics

:Languages

Sets which languages should be available. If there is more than one, a dropdown is displayed in the header.

See Internationalization for a curl example and related settings.

:InheritParentRoleAssignments

:InheritParentRoleAssignments can be set to a comma-separated list of role aliases or ‘*’ (all) to cause newly created Dataverses to inherit the set of users and/or internal groups who have assignments for those role(s) on the parent Dataverse, i.e. those users/groups will be assigned the same role(s) on the new Dataverse (in addition to the creator of the new Dataverse having an admin role). This can be helpful in situations where multiple organizations are sharing one Dataverse instance. The default, if :InheritParentRoleAssignments is not set is for the creator of the new Dataverse to be the only one assigned a role.

curl -X PUT -d 'admin, curator' http://localhost:8080/api/admin/settings/:InheritParentRoleAssignments or curl -X PUT -d '*' http://localhost:8080/api/admin/settings/:InheritParentRoleAssignments

:AllowCors

Allows Cross-Origin Resource sharing(CORS). By default this setting is absent and Dataverse assumes it to be true.

If you don’t want to allow CORS for your installation, set:

curl -X PUT -d 'false' http://localhost:8080/api/admin/settings/:AllowCors

:ChronologicalDateFacets

Unlike other facets, those indexed by Date/Year are sorted chronologically by default, with the most recent value first. To have them sorted by number of hits, e.g. with the year with the most results first, set this to false

If you don’t want date facets to be sorted chronologically, set:

curl -X PUT -d 'false' http://localhost:8080/api/admin/settings/:ChronologicalDateFacets

:CustomZipDownloadServiceUrl

The location of the “Standalone Zipper” service. If this option is specified, Dataverse will be redirecing bulk/mutli-file zip download requests to that location, instead of serving them internally. See the “Advanced” section of the Installation guide for information on how to install the external zipper. (This is still an experimental feature, as of v5.0).

To enable redirects to the zipper installed on the same server as the main Dataverse application:

curl -X PUT -d '/cgi-bin/zipdownload' http://localhost:8080/api/admin/settings/:CustomZipDownloadServiceUrl

To enable redirects to the zipper on a different server:

curl -X PUT -d 'https://zipper.example.edu/cgi-bin/zipdownload' http://localhost:8080/api/admin/settings/:CustomZipDownloadServiceUrl