Presenting the La Toolkit

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Presenting the Living Atlases Toolkit

_Jun-2021

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

Atlas of Living Australia

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

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ALA Install

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

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

Ansible

ala-install uses ansible to automatize their deployments.

Using a metaphor:

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

Some advantages

You can deploy your LA portal with the same deployment code that ALA and other LA portals use
... and this is independent of the size of your LA portal

But "recipes" needs "ingredients"

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

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

domain, organization name, contact email,
the servers you want to use for each service, and how your services urls will look like,
passwords and security info

Ansible inventories

In other words, with that inventories you define how ala-install will install your LA portal (or upgrade it in the future).

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

We developed other tools

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

the Living Atlas Ansible Generator, that helps you to generate your custom ansible inventories
its web version
some base branding that you can adapt to your portal with different themes

among other tools...

But this was not enough

The deployment is still difficult for newcomers
It requires some GNU/Linux deployment environment with all the tools (like ansible) well configured
There are many options
It requires some sysadmin knowledge
It's not so clear how to maintain or upgrade a LA portal

Introducing the

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

How?

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

This LA toolkit is like a big assistant of the different phases and tasks of the deployment and maintenance of a LA portal

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For new and existing LA portals

Lets see it in action...

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