Server hosting requirements

Work in progress

1. Brainstormed answer:

Beyond the basic sysadmin stuff of backups, software updates, and the like, I think the main things are:

• Have installed a production version of Jetty (or Apache Tomcat).
• Have someone (either provider or user, probably via SSH access) configure proxying.
• Have configured SFTP or similar to be able to upload files into the correct webapps folder.

I do have some documentation for pre-EFES Kiln that includes some bits where configuration is slightly annoying, such as:

• Creating log directories (the ones for Sesame were outside webapps).
• Configuring Tomcat to not try to turn / into /index.html
• Copying solr.xml configuration file into Tomcat's conf directory (outside of webapps)
• Linking Kiln's webapps directory into Tomcat, removing the latter's existing webapps directory (necessary if you want to use a clone of the repository).

Those are all things that are likely to require some form of shell access, and that a web hosting provider is unlikely to do themselves. (Note however that most of these points assume the use of Tomcat, while Jetty is the default server shipped with EFES, and should be both simpler and adequate for deployment needs.)

2. In case it helps this is how we (viz. King's Digital Lab) currently do it for our projects:

• Ubuntu Linux
• Apache or nginx configured as a proxy to Kiln
• Kiln, Solr, etc. set up as a webapps in Jetty
• SSH and git to deploy updates onto the server

(Thanks to Jamie Norrish and Miguel Vieira for the above comments.)

For a step-by-step tutorial on the host server setup (using Jetty), see here.