Prerequisites

Before running the Dataverse Software installation script, you must install and configure Linux, Java, Payara, PostgreSQL, Solr, and jq. The other software listed below is optional but can provide useful features.

After following all the steps below, you can proceed to the Installation section.

Linux

We assume you plan to run your Dataverse installation on Linux and we recommend RHEL or a derivative such as RockyLinux or AlmaLinux, which is the distribution family tested by the Dataverse Project team. Please be aware that while EL8 (RHEL/derivatives) is the recommended platform, the steps below were orginally written for EL6 and may need to be updated (please feel free to make a pull request!). A number of community members have installed the Dataverse Software in Debian/Ubuntu environments.

Java

The Dataverse Software requires Java SE 17 (or higher).

Installing Java

The Dataverse Software should run fine with only the Java Runtime Environment (JRE) installed, but installing the Java Development Kit (JDK) is recommended so that useful tools for troubleshooting production environments are available. We recommend using Oracle JDK or OpenJDK.

The Oracle JDK can be downloaded from https://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/javase/downloads/index.html

On a RHEL/derivative, install OpenJDK (devel version) using yum:

# sudo yum install java-17-openjdk

If you have multiple versions of Java installed, Java 17 should be the default when java is invoked from the command line. You can test this by running java -version.

On RHEL/derivative you can make Java 17 the default with the alternatives command, having it prompt you to select the version of Java from a list:

# alternatives --config java

Payara

Payara 6.2024.6 is recommended. Newer versions might work fine. Regular updates are recommended.

Installing Payara

Note: The Dataverse Software installer need not be run as root, and it is recommended that Payara not run as root either. We suggest the creation of a “dataverse” service account for this purpose:

# useradd dataverse

  • Download and install Payara (installed in /usr/local/payara6 in the example commands below):

    # wget https://nexus.payara.fish/repository/payara-community/fish/payara/distributions/payara/6.2024.6/payara-6.2024.6.zip
# unzip payara-6.2024.6.zip
# mv payara6 /usr/local

If nexus.payara.fish is ever down for maintenance, Payara distributions are also available from https://repo1.maven.org/maven2/fish/payara/distributions/payara/

If you intend to install and run Payara under a service account (and we hope you do), chown -R the Payara hierarchy to root to protect it but give the service account access to the below directories:

  • Set service account permissions:

    # chown -R root:root /usr/local/payara6
# chown dataverse /usr/local/payara6/glassfish/lib
# chown -R dataverse:dataverse /usr/local/payara6/glassfish/domains/domain1

After installation, you may chown the lib/ directory back to root; the installer only needs write access to copy the JDBC driver into that directory.

  • Change from -client to -server under <jvm-options>-client</jvm-options>:

    # vim /usr/local/payara6/glassfish/domains/domain1/config/domain.xml

This recommendation comes from http://www.c2b2.co.uk/middleware-blog/glassfish-4-performance-tuning-monitoring-and-troubleshooting.php among other places.

Launching Payara on System Boot

The Dataverse Software installation script will start Payara if necessary, but you may find the following scripts helpful to launch Payara start automatically on boot. They were originally written for Glassfish but have been adjusted for Payara.

  • This Systemd file may be serve as a reference for systems using Systemd (such as RHEL/derivative or Debian 10, Ubuntu 16+)

  • This init script may be useful for RHEL/derivative or Ubuntu >= 14 if you’re using a Payara service account, or

  • This Payara init script may be helpful if you’re just going to run Payara as root (not recommended).

It is not necessary for Payara to be running before you execute the Dataverse Software installation script; it will start Payara for you.

Please note that you must run Payara in an English locale. If you are using something like LANG=de_DE.UTF-8, ingest of tabular data will fail with the message “RoundRoutines:decimal separator no in right place”.

Also note that Payara may utilize more than the default number of file descriptors, especially when running batch jobs such as harvesting. We have increased ours by adding ulimit -n 32768 to our Payara init script. On operating systems which use systemd such as RHEL/derivative, file descriptor limits may be increased by adding a line like LimitNOFILE=32768 to the systemd unit file. You may adjust the file descriptor limits on running processes by using the prlimit utility:

# sudo prlimit --pid pid --nofile=32768:32768

PostgreSQL

PostgreSQL 13 is recommended because it’s the version we test against. Version 10 or higher is required because that’s what’s supported by Flyway, which we use for database migrations.

You are welcome to experiment with newer versions of PostgreSQL, but please note that as of PostgreSQL 15, permissions have been restricted on the public schema (release notes, EDB blog post, Crunchy Data blog post). The Dataverse installer has been updated to restore the old permissions, but this may not be a long term solution.

Installing PostgreSQL

For example, to install PostgreSQL 13 under RHEL7/derivative:

# yum install -y https://download.postgresql.org/pub/repos/yum/reporpms/EL-7-x86_64/pgdg-redhat-repo-latest.noarch.rpm
# yum makecache fast
# yum install -y postgresql13-server
# /usr/pgsql-13/bin/postgresql-13-setup initdb
# /usr/bin/systemctl start postgresql-13
# /usr/bin/systemctl enable postgresql-13

For RHEL8/derivative the process would be identical, except for the first two commands: you would need to install the “EL-8” yum repository configuration and run yum makecache instead.

Configuring Database Access for the Dataverse Installation (and the Dataverse Software Installer)

  • The application and the installer script will be connecting to PostgreSQL over TCP/IP, using password authentication. In this section we explain how to configure PostgreSQL to accept these connections.

  • If PostgreSQL is running on the same server as Payara, find the localhost (127.0.0.1) entry that’s already in the pg_hba.conf and modify it to look like this:

    host all all 127.0.0.1/32 md5

    Once you are done with the prerequisites and run the installer script (documented here: Installation) it will ask you to enter the address of the Postgres server. Simply accept the default value 127.0.0.1 there.

  • The Dataverse Software installer script will need to connect to PostgreSQL as the admin user, in order to create and set up the database that the Dataverse installation will be using. If for whatever reason it is failing to connect (for example, if you don’t know/remember what your Postgres admin password is), you may choose to temporarily disable all the access restrictions on localhost connections, by changing the above line to:

    host all all 127.0.0.1/32 trust

    Note that this rule opens access to the database server via localhost only. Still, in a production environment, this may constitute a security risk. So you will likely want to change it back to “md5” once the installer has finished.

  • If the Dataverse installation is running on a different server, you will need to add a new entry to the pg_hba.conf granting it access by its network address:

    host all all [ADDRESS]      255.255.255.255 md5

    Where [ADDRESS] is the numeric IP address of the Payara server. Enter this address when the installer asks for the PostgreSQL server address.

  • In some distributions, PostgreSQL is pre-configured so that it doesn’t accept network connections at all. Check that the listen_address line in the configuration file postgresql.conf is not commented out and looks like this:

    listen_addresses='*'

    The file postgresql.conf will be located in the same directory as the pg_hba.conf above.

  • Important: PostgreSQL must be restarted for the configuration changes to take effect! On RHEL7/derivative and similar (provided you installed Postgres as instructed above):

    # systemctl restart postgresql-13

    On MacOS X a “Reload Configuration” icon is usually supplied in the PostgreSQL application folder. Or you could look up the process id of the PostgreSQL postmaster process, and send it the SIGHUP signal:

    kill -1 PROCESS_ID

Solr

The Dataverse software search index is powered by Solr.

Supported Versions

The Dataverse software has been tested with Solr version 9.4.1. Future releases in the 9.x series are likely to be compatible. Please get in touch (Getting Help) if you are having trouble with a newer version.

Installing Solr

You should not run Solr as root. Create a user called solr and a directory to install Solr into:

useradd solr
mkdir /usr/local/solr
chown solr:solr /usr/local/solr

Become the solr user and then download and configure Solr:

su - solr
cd /usr/local/solr
wget https://archive.apache.org/dist/solr/solr/9.4.1/solr-9.4.1.tgz
tar xvzf solr-9.4.1.tgz
cd solr-9.4.1
cp -r server/solr/configsets/_default server/solr/collection1

You should already have a “dvinstall.zip” file that you downloaded from https://github.com/IQSS/dataverse/releases . Unzip it into /tmp. Then copy the files into place:

cp /tmp/dvinstall/schema*.xml /usr/local/solr/solr-9.4.1/server/solr/collection1/conf
cp /tmp/dvinstall/solrconfig.xml /usr/local/solr/solr-9.4.1/server/solr/collection1/conf

Note: The Dataverse Project team has customized Solr to boost results that come from certain indexed elements inside the Dataverse installation, for example prioritizing results from Dataverse collections over Datasets. If you would like to remove this, edit your solrconfig.xml and remove the <str name="qf"> element and its contents. If you have ideas about how this boosting could be improved, feel free to contact us through our Google Group https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/dataverse-dev .

A Dataverse installation requires a change to the jetty.xml file that ships with Solr. Edit /usr/local/solr/solr-9.4.1/server/etc/jetty.xml , increasing requestHeaderSize from 8192 to 102400

Solr will warn about needing to increase the number of file descriptors and max processes in a production environment but will still run with defaults. We have increased these values to the recommended levels by adding ulimit -n 65000 to the init script, and the following to /etc/security/limits.conf:

solr soft nproc 65000
solr hard nproc 65000
solr soft nofile 65000
solr hard nofile 65000

On operating systems which use systemd such as RHEL/derivative, you may then add a line like LimitNOFILE=65000 for the number of open file descriptors and a line with LimitNPROC=65000 for the max processes to the systemd unit file, or adjust the limits on a running process using the prlimit tool:

# sudo prlimit --pid pid --nofile=65000:65000

Solr launches asynchronously and attempts to use the lsof binary to watch for its own availability. Installation of this package isn’t required but will prevent a warning in the log at startup:

# yum install lsof

Finally, you need to tell Solr to create the core “collection1” on startup:

echo "name=collection1" > /usr/local/solr/solr-9.4.1/server/solr/collection1/core.properties

Dataverse collection (“dataverse”) page uses Solr very heavily. On a busy instance this may cause the search engine to become the performance bottleneck, making these pages take increasingly longer to load, potentially affecting the overall performance of the application and/or causing Solr itself to crash. If this is observed on your instance, we recommend uncommenting the following lines in the <circuitBreaker ...> section of the solrconfig.xml file:

<str name="memEnabled">true</str>
<str name="memThreshold">75</str>

and:

<str name="cpuEnabled">true</str>
<str name="cpuThreshold">75</str>

This will activate Solr “circuit breaker” mechanisms that make it start dropping incoming requests with the HTTP code 503 when it starts experiencing load issues. As of Dataverse 6.1, the collection page will recognize this condition and display a customizeable message to the users informing them that the search engine is unavailable because of heavy load, with the assumption that the condition is transitive and suggesting that they try again later. This is still an inconvenience to the users, but still a more graceful handling of the problem, rather than letting the pages time out or causing crashes. You may need to experiment and adjust the threshold values defined in the lines above.

If this becomes a common issue, another temporary workaround an admin may choose to use is to enable the following setting:

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

This will make the collection page show the search results without the usual search facets on the left side of the page. Another customizeable message will be shown in that column informing the users that facets are temporarily unavailable. Generating these facets is more resource-intensive for Solr than the main search results themselves, so applying this measure will significantly reduce the load on the search engine.

Solr Init Script

Please choose the right option for your underlying Linux operating system. It will not be necessary to execute both!

For systems running systemd (like RedHat or derivatives since 7, Debian since 9, Ubuntu since 15.04), as root, download solr.service and place it in /tmp. Then start Solr and configure it to start at boot with the following commands:

cp /tmp/solr.service /etc/systemd/system
systemctl daemon-reload
systemctl start solr.service
systemctl enable solr.service

For systems using init.d (like CentOS 6), download this Solr init script and place it in /tmp. Then start Solr and configure it to start at boot with the following commands:

cp /tmp/solr /etc/init.d
service start solr
chkconfig solr on

Securing Solr

As of version 9.3.0, Solr listens solely on localhost for security reasons. If your installation will run Solr on its own host, you will need to edit bin/solr.in.sh, setting JETTY_HOST to the external IP address of your Solr server to tell Solr to accept external connections.

We strongly recommend that you also use a firewall to block access to the Solr port (8983) from outside networks. It is very important not to allow direct access to the Solr API from outside networks! Otherwise, any host that can reach Solr can add or delete data, search unpublished data, and even reconfigure Solr. For more information, please see https://solr.apache.org/guide/solr/latest/deployment-guide/securing-solr.html

We additionally recommend that the Solr service account’s shell be disabled, as it isn’t necessary for daily operation:

# usermod -s /sbin/nologin solr

For Solr upgrades or further configuration you may temporarily re-enable the service account shell:

# usermod -s /bin/bash solr

or simply prepend each command you would run as the Solr user with “sudo -u solr”:

# sudo -u solr command

Finally, we would like to reiterate that it is simply never a good idea to run Solr as root! Running the process as a non-privileged user would substantially minimize any potential damage even in the event that the instance is compromised.

jq

Installing jq

jq is a command line tool for parsing JSON output that is used by the Dataverse Software installation script. It is available in the appstream repository:

# dnf install jq

or you may install the latest binary for your OS and platform, available from https://github.com/jqlang/jq/releases

ImageMagick

The Dataverse Software uses ImageMagick to generate thumbnail previews of PDF files. This is an optional component, meaning that if you don’t have ImageMagick installed, there will be no thumbnails for PDF files, in the search results and on the dataset pages; but everything else will be working. (Thumbnail previews for non-PDF image files are generated using standard Java libraries and do not require any special installation steps).

Installing and configuring ImageMagick

On a Red Hat or derivative Linux distribution, you can install ImageMagick with something like:

# yum install ImageMagick

(most RedHat systems will have it pre-installed). When installed using standard yum mechanism, above, the executable for the ImageMagick convert utility will be located at /usr/bin/convert. No further configuration steps will then be required.

If the installed location of the convert executable is different from /usr/bin/convert, you will also need to specify it in your Payara configuration using the JVM option, below. For example:

<jvm-options>-Ddataverse.path.imagemagick.convert=/opt/local/bin/convert</jvm-options>

(see the Configuration section for more information on the JVM options)

R

The Dataverse Software uses R to handle tabular data files. The instructions below describe a minimal R Project installation. It will allow you to ingest R (.RData) files as tabular data and to export tabular data as .RData files. R can be considered an optional component, meaning that if you don’t have R installed, you will still be able to run and use the Dataverse Software - but the functionality specific to tabular data mentioned above will not be available to your users.

Installing R

For RHEL/derivative, the EPEL distribution is strongly recommended:

If yum isn’t configured to use EPEL repositories ( https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/EPEL ):

RHEL8/derivative users can install the epel-release RPM:

yum install https://dl.fedoraproject.org/pub/epel/epel-release-latest-8.noarch.rpm

RHEL7/derivative users can install the epel-release RPM:

yum install https://dl.fedoraproject.org/pub/epel/epel-release-latest-7.noarch.rpm

RHEL 8 users will need to enable the CodeReady-Builder repository:

subscription-manager repos --enable codeready-builder-for-rhel-8-x86_64-rpms

Rocky or AlmaLinux 8.3+ users will need to enable the PowerTools repository:

dnf config-manager --enable powertools

RHEL 7 users will want to log in to their organization’s respective RHN interface, find the particular machine in question and:

  • click on “Subscribed Channels: Alter Channel Subscriptions”

  • enable EPEL, Server Extras, Server Optional

Finally, install R with yum:

yum install R-core R-core-devel

Installing the required R libraries

The following R packages (libraries) are required:

R2HTML
rjson
DescTools
Rserve
haven

Install them following the normal R package installation procedures. For example, with the following R commands:

install.packages("R2HTML", repos="https://cloud.r-project.org/", lib="/usr/lib64/R/library" )
install.packages("rjson", repos="https://cloud.r-project.org/", lib="/usr/lib64/R/library" )
install.packages("DescTools", repos="https://cloud.r-project.org/", lib="/usr/lib64/R/library" )
install.packages("Rserve", repos="https://cloud.r-project.org/", lib="/usr/lib64/R/library" )
install.packages("haven", repos="https://cloud.r-project.org/", lib="/usr/lib64/R/library" )

Rserve

The Dataverse Software uses Rserve to communicate to R. Rserve is installed as a library package, as described in the step above. It runs as a daemon process on the server, accepting network connections on a dedicated port. This requires some extra configuration and we provide a script for setting it up.

You’ll want to obtain local copies of the Rserve setup files found in https://github.com/IQSS/dataverse/tree/master/scripts/r/rserve either by cloning a local copy of the IQSS repository: git clone -b master https://github.com/IQSS/dataverse.git or by downloading the files individually.

Run the script as follows (as root):

cd <DATAVERSE SOURCE TREE>/scripts/r/rserve
./rserve-setup.sh

The setup script will create a system user rserve that will run the daemon process. It will install the startup script for the daemon (/etc/init.d/rserve), so that it gets started automatically when the system boots. This is an init.d-style startup file. If this is a RedHat/CentOS 7 system, you may want to use the rserve.service systemd unit file instead. Copy it into the /usr/lib/systemd/system/ directory, then:

# systemctl daemon-reload
# systemctl enable rserve
# systemctl start rserve

Note that the setup will also set the Rserve password to “rserve”. Rserve daemon runs under a non-privileged user id, so there’s not much potential for security damage through unauthorized access. It is however still a good idea to change the password. The password is specified in /etc/Rserv.pwd. You can consult Rserve documentation for more information on password encryption and access security.

You should already have the following 4 JVM options added to your domain.xml by the Dataverse installer:

<jvm-options>-Ddataverse.rserve.host=localhost</jvm-options>
<jvm-options>-Ddataverse.rserve.port=6311</jvm-options>
<jvm-options>-Ddataverse.rserve.user=rserve</jvm-options>
<jvm-options>-Ddataverse.rserve.password=rserve</jvm-options>

If you have changed the password, make sure it is correctly specified in the dataverse.rserve.password option above. If Rserve is running on a host that’s different from your Dataverse installation, change the dataverse.rserve.host option above as well (and make sure the port 6311 on the Rserve host is not firewalled from your Dataverse installation host).

Counter Processor

Counter Processor is required to enable Make Data Count metrics in a Dataverse installation. See the Make Data Count section of the Admin Guide for a description of this feature. Counter Processor is open source and we will be downloading it from https://github.com/gdcc/counter-processor

Installing Counter Processor

A scripted installation using Ansible is mentioned in the Make Data Count section of the Developer Guide.

As root, download and install Counter Processor:

cd /usr/local
wget https://github.com/gdcc/counter-processor/archive/refs/tags/v1.05.tar.gz
tar xvfz v1.05.tar.gz
cd /usr/local/counter-processor-1.05

Installing GeoLite Country Database

Counter Processor can report per country results if the optional GeoLite Country Database is installed. At present, this database is free but to use it one must signing an agreement (EULA) with MaxMind. (The primary concern appears to be that individuals can opt-out of having their location tracked via IP address and, due to various privacy laws, MaxMind needs a way to comply with that for products it has “sold” (for no cost in this case). Their agreement requires you to either configure automatic updates to the GeoLite Country database or be responsible on your own for managing take down notices.) The process required to sign up, download the database, and to configure automated updating is described at https://blog.maxmind.com/2019/12/18/significant-changes-to-accessing-and-using-geolite2-databases/ and the links from that page.

As root, change to the Counter Processor directory you just created, download the GeoLite2-Country tarball from MaxMind, untar it, and copy the geoip database into place:

<download or move the GeoLite2-Country.tar.gz to the /usr/local/counter-processor-1.05 directory>
tar xvfz GeoLite2-Country.tar.gz
cp GeoLite2-Country_*/GeoLite2-Country.mmdb maxmind_geoip

Creating a counter User

As root, create a “counter” user and change ownership of Counter Processor directory to this new user:

useradd counter
chown -R counter:counter /usr/local/counter-processor-1.05

Installing Counter Processor Python Requirements

Counter Processor version 1.05 requires Python 3.7 or higher. This version of Python is available in many operating systems, and is purportedly available for RHEL7 or CentOS 7 via Red Hat Software Collections. Alternately, one may compile it from source.

The following commands are intended to be run as root but we are aware that Pythonistas might prefer fancy virtualenv or similar setups. Pull requests are welcome to improve these steps!

Install Python 3.9:

yum install python39

Install Counter Processor Python requirements:

python3.9 -m ensurepip
cd /usr/local/counter-processor-1.05
pip3 install -r requirements.txt

See the Make Data Count section of the Admin Guide for how to configure and run Counter Processor.

Next Steps

Now that you have all the prerequisites in place, you can proceed to the Installation section.