some questions about hosting our own instance of kobotoolbox

[dolley...@gmail.com]

Hello kobotoolbox team,

I work in the IT staff of a research organization working for the sustainable development.
We would like to use your kobotoolbox with some of our project.
But our policies require us to host the data.

I have already install kobotoolbox on my computer. (following this
documentation :
http://support.kobotoolbox.org/customer/portal/articles/1691105-installing-and-using-kobotoolbox-on-your-computer
and then transform the virtualbox file to an vmware file ).

We have the following questions:

1-We would like to change the web server port (8000 to 80). I have tried
to do it but I was not successful, how can I do that?
2-We want to backup the system on our library system, is there a way to
create a consistent backup of the application?
3-Currently, the VM is based on an Ubuntu system. We are mainly using
Centos. Do you know if it is possible to run your application on Centos,
do you have any documentation and do you "support" it?
4-I wonder how future update can be performed on our system, do you have
any documentation?
5-If I made the good configuration using my own smtp server can the
"self account creation" work?

Thank you in advance for your reply

Best regards
Thomas

[Esmail Fadae]

Hi, Thomas. I'll preface this by mentioning that we're going to be moving away from Vagrant and migrating our virtualization approach to Docker in the coming weeks, so depending on your timeline, that might be something to consider.

1. I just made some updates to the setup to make this easier. To do so, put something like the following in `env/env.sh`:
export KOBO_SERVER_IP=192.168.1.113
export KOBOFORM_SERVER_PORT=80

Due to a known race condition with syncing the filesystems, you'll have to `vagrant reload` your VM twice for the change to take effect. Also, note that to use ports less than 1024, you'll have to run Vagrant as a privileged user

2. You could try SSHing in and doing a Postgres dump like:
sudo -u postgres bash -c "pg_dump \"$KOBO_PSQL_DB_NAME\" | xz" > my_backup.sql.xz

3. No. We develop primarily on Ubuntu flavors and Vagrant (soon Docker) is our way of supporting alternative environments.

4. We don't currently have an easy way to update the VMs. For clues on updating the system, you can check out the Fabric files we use to update our production servers:
https://github.com/kobotoolbox/dkobo/blob/master/fabfile.py#L54-L90
https://github.com/kobotoolbox/kobocat/blob/master/fabfile.py#L83-L118
(Check https://github.com/kobotoolbox/enketo-express for instructions on updating Enketo).

5. We haven't tried that on a VM, but presumably the usual Django e-mail setup will work: https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/1.6/topics/email/.

[dolley...@gmail.com]

Hi Esmail,

Thank you for your answer.

You can find my comment below

1. Great I wil test it .
2. Ok I can see the idea,  but  to be sure,  that mean that all data are in the database ?
3. OK. Do you know when the release with docker will be available  ? 
4. OK. If we do something  like backup all data base , redeploy the VM and import the backuped database. Is this going to work ?
5. OK I will try.



Best regards
Thomas

[Ben Brown]

Any updates to this? I'm looking to update my instance from vagrant to docker but I am worried that I'll lose my data!

[Esmail Fadae]

Hi, Ben. Apologies for the delay in getting back to you. I'm currently in the process of the related work of setting up automated backups to use with our Docker environment (https://github.com/kobotoolbox/kobo-docker/pull/76). If you're comfortable doing so, replicating the steps taken in the `backup_*.bash` scripts should be sufficient to get you backups of your KoBoCAT media, Mongo DB, and Postgres DB (no Redis DB yet). I'm still figuring out how to approach restoring backups in `kobo-docker`, but in the meantime maybe we could just step through the process together.

Regards,
Esmail

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[Vincent Buscarello]

How did this turn out Ben? any continued issues?