Deployment Alternatives¶

There are many ways to deploy Girder into production. Here is a set of guides on how to deploy Girder to several different platforms.

Reverse Proxy¶

In many cases, it is useful to route multiple web services from a single server. For example, if you have a server accepting requests at www.example.com, you may want to forward requests to www.example.com/girder to a Girder instance listening on port 9000.

Anytime you deploy behind a proxy, Girder must be configured properly in order to serve content correctly. This can be accomplished by setting a few parameters in your local configuration file (see Configuration). In this example, we have the following:

[global]
server.socket_host = "127.0.0.1"
server.socket_port = 9000
tools.proxy.on = True

[server]
api_root = "/girder/api/v1"
static_public_path = "/girder/static"

Note

If your chosen proxy server does not add the appropriate X-Forwarded-Host header (containing the host used in http requests, including any non-default port to proxied requests), the tools.proxy.base and tools.proxy.local configuration options must also be set in the [global] section as:

tools.proxy.base = "http://www.example.com/girder"
tools.proxy.local = ""

Note that after changing these parameters, it is necessary to rebuild the web client.

Nginx¶

Nginx can be used by adding a block such as:

location /girder/ {
    proxy_set_header Host $proxy_host;
    proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-For $proxy_add_x_forwarded_for;
    proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-Host $host;
    proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-Proto $scheme;
    proxy_pass http://localhost:9000/;
    # Must set the following for SSE notifications to work
    proxy_buffering off;
    proxy_cache off;
    proxy_set_header Connection '';
    proxy_http_version 1.1;
    chunked_transfer_encoding off;
    proxy_read_timeout 600s;
    proxy_send_timeout 600s;
    # proxy_request_buffering option only works on nginx >= 1.7.11
    # but is necessary to support streaming requests
    proxy_request_buffering off;
}

And under the containing server block, make sure to add the following rule:

server {
    client_max_body_size 500M;
    # ... elided configuration
}

Ansible¶

Deployment provides a complete installation workflow which depends primarily on the Ansible roles:

These roles are also independently usable and may be composed as part of larger, custom Ansible playbooks.

Docker Container¶

Every time a new commit is pushed to master, Docker Hub is updated with new images for running Girder. These containers expose Girder at port 8080 and require the database URL to be passed in as an option. For more information, see the Docker Hub Page. Since the container does not run a database, you’ll need to run a command in the form:

$ docker run -p 8080:8080 girder/girder --database mongodb://db-server-external-ip:27017/girder --host 0.0.0.0

The girder/girder:latest image is quite large and intended for use as a base image for plugin developers. If you just need to run Girder, a slim image based on alpine linux is provided without many of the build tools needed to compile wheels or run girder client builds:

$ docker run -p 8080:8080 girder/girder:slim --database mongodb://db-server-external-ip:27017/girder