The Permafrost Database Evironment

This package provides a containerized permafrost database environment. The environment includes the following services:

• POSTGRES + POSTGIS running a permafrost sensor & observation database
• sensorDb, a web interface for adding observations to the database

Background

This package uses docker compose to create an easy-to-use instance of the permafrost database. You will need to have docker compose installed on your computer for this to work.

Docker creates two separate containers - one for the postgres database and one for the sensordb web service. The first time you launch the environment, the database will be built and populated with some device profiles.

Launching

First, download this repository and go into the directory:

git clone https://github.com/geocryology/permafrostdb-suite
cd permafrostdb-suite

To start the permafrost database environment, assuming you're in the same directory as the docker-compose.yml file, enter the following:

docker-compose up

To run the services in the background, add the --detach flag:

docker-compose up --detach

Accessing

Once the services are up and running, you will be able to access the sensorDb interface through your browser. By default, sensorDb is configured to run on port 5308. From your computer, this is reachable by 127.0.0.1:5308 in your web browser. If port 5308 is used for something else, you can change this in the install.properties file.

The database container uses port 6432 (this maps to 5432 within the container). If you are connecting to the databse from your computer, you will use the address 127.0.0.1:6432. Experienced users can use the PermafrostDB R package to interact with the database.

Tearing down

When the docker container is stopped, the database data that has been created persists on a docker-managed volume. When you restart the docker services, you will be able to access any data that you created. However, If you want to start from scratch with a fresh database or if the database did not initialize correctly, you must first remove the volume before rebuilding. To remove the volume, use the following command:

docker-compose down --volume

Note that this will delete all data in the database

Security concerns

This package has not been tested for a production environment. Default database passwords are stored in plaintext within this repository. Please consider changing the following values:

• POSTGRES_PASSWORD environment variable in docker-compose.yml
• db.password in sensitive.properties (this must match the password defined in 3_add_roles.sql which should also be changed).
• server.key in sensitive.properties