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Deployment

This documentation is aimed at system administrators and business leaders who wish to deploy the Arkindex platform on their own hardware or cloud provider instead of using instances provided by Teklia (like demo.arkindex.org).

If you are interested in using Arkindex on your own documents, but cannot publish them on publicly available instances (due to privacy or regulatory concerns), it’s possible to deploy the full Arkindex platform on your own infrastructure.

We currently offer two editions of Arkindex:

  1. Community Edition, under the AGPL-v3 open-source license, suitable if your project is also open-source;
  2. Enterprise Edition, suitable for all proprietary projects.

Please contact us if you are interested in Arkindex for your company or institution. We offer dedicated services for all your Arkindex needs (training, setup, project consulting, feature development, …)

Requirements

Arkindex needs a few hard requirements to run on your own hardware:

  • Docker is needed, as we only deploy through Docker images.
  • Linux servers are the only Operating System we support. We heavily recommend using Ubuntu LTS.
  • All your images must be hosted on a IIIF server, or you’ll need to expose them through a local IIIF server.
  • A domain name for the platform server:
    • Ideally, a public domain name if your server is reachable on Internet (like arkindex.company.com).
    • or an internal domain name, provided by your company’s system administrator.
  • An SSL certificate for that domain name:
    • it can be provided by Let’s Encrypt freely and automatically if your server is reachable on Internet
    • or an internal certificate, provided by your company’s system administrator.
  • An SMTP email account, with TLS. This is needed so that the Arkindex instance can send verification emails to new users and various notifications.
  • Distributed file storage using an S3-API compatible backend (either an online cloud provider such as Amazon S3, Cloudflare R2, or a locally deployed instance of MinIO or Ceph Object Store).
    • You will need several buckets for your instance. More information on this topic is available here and there

To run the Enterprise Edition, your servers must be able to make regular API calls (a few times a day) on a remote server to validate its licence. The server does not necessarily need to be exposed to the Internet, but only to be able to make requests towards a domain.

Content

In this section you’ll find out how to:

  1. Pick an architecture that suits your needs.
  2. Choose your own hardware to run Arkindex efficiently that suits your needs.
  3. Setup Arkindex in production mode.
  4. Configure Arkindex.