metadata-catalogue

Oxford Biomedical Research Centre Metadata Catalogue

This core component contains the database layer, and HTTP REST API.

System requirements

• Tomcat 8 (untested on other versions)
• Postgres 9.4.4.1 (untested on other versions)

To run the application, you need to create a database, and an appropriate database user, build the war file, and deploy it to Tomcat with the correct configuration.

Create a database

From the postgres command line, run the following commands:

CREATE USER metadatacatalogue WITH SUPERUSER PASSWORD 'password';
CREATE DATABASE metadatacatalogue OWNER metadatacatalogue;

replacing password with the password of your choice.

To build

Either download the latest .war file from jenkins, or build it by checking out this repository, running

mvn verify

and taking the .war file from the target directory

To deploy

Stop tomcat if it is already running. Unzip the .war file into a directory webapps directory (e.g.) webapps/metadatacatalogue.

Update the META-INF/persistence.properties file - it should have contents something like this:

hibernate.connection.username=metadatacatalogue
hibernate.connection.password=password
hibernate.connection.url=jdbc:postgresql://localhost:5432/metadatacatalogue

where password is the value you chose in step 1.

Start tomcat, and you should be able to navigate to the test end point at:

http://localhost:8080/metadatacatalogue/api/test

and get a friendly message in return.

Authentication

The database installation scripts include the creation of a default API user to bootstrap further user creation. The username is [email protected] and the password is password.

You can test successful login by visiting

http://localhost:8080/metadatacatalogue/api/testSecured

and getting the same friendly message.

Swagger

Swagger is used to document the API. You can view the human-readable documentation by browsing to:

http://localhost:8080/metadatacatalogue/swagger

However, the interface is very slow, because some of the datastructures are recursive. You may just want to view the JSON.

If you want to just view the JSON, then the description of the API is found here:

http://localhost:8080/metadatacatalogue/api/swagger.json