Installation

Before you install, see the System Prerequisites guide to make sure you have all required system packages installed.

Creating a virtual environment

While not strictly required, it is recommended to install Girder within its own virtual environment to isolate its dependencies from other python packages. To generate a new virtual environment, first install/update the virtualenv and pip packages

sudo pip install -U virtualenv pip

Now create a virtual environment using the virtualenv command. You can place the virtual environment directory wherever you want, but it should not be moved. The following command will generate a new directory called girder_env in your home directory:

virtualenv ~/girder_env

Enter the virtual environment:

. ~/girder_env/bin/activate

The (girder_env) prepended to your prompt indicates you have entered the virtual environment. Inside the virtual environment you can use pip, python, and any other python script installed in your path as usual. You can exit the virtual environment by running the shell function deactivate. The shell variable VIRTUAL_ENV will also list the absolute path to the current virtual environment. Entering a virtual environment only persists for your current shell, so you must source the activation script again whenever you wish to enter within a new shell session. Users and developers needing to work on several virtual environments should consider using other packages that help manage them such as virtualenvwrapper, autoenv, pyenv-virtualenv, or pyenv-virtualenvwrapper.

Sources

Girder can be installed either from the Python Package Index (pypi) or via a Git repository. Installing from pypi gives you the latest distributed version. Installing from git would be more suitable for development or to have a specific commit, or to use the latest Girder features before they are released in official packages.

Install from pypi

To install the Girder distribution from the python package index, simply run

pip install girder

This will install the core Girder server as a site package in your system or virtual environment. At this point, you might want to check the configuration to change your plugin and logging paths. In order to use the web interface, you must also install the web client libraries. Girder installs a python script that will automatically build and install these libraries for you. Just run the following command:

girder-install web

Note

Installing the web client code requires the node package manager (npm). See the System Prerequisites section for instructions on installing nodejs.

Note

If you installed Girder into your system site-packages, you may need to run the above commands as root.

Once this is done, you are ready to start using Girder as described in this section: Run.

Installing extra dependencies with pip

Girder comes bundled with a number of Plugins that require extra python dependencies in order to use. By default, none of these dependencies will be installed; however, you can tell pip to install them using pip’s “extras ” syntax. Each girder plugin requiring extra python dependencies can be specified during the pip install. For example, installing girder with support for the celery_jobs and geospatial plugins can be done like this:

pip install girder[celery_jobs,geospatial]

There is also an extra you can use to install the dependencies for all bundled plugins supported in the current python environment called plugins:

pip install girder[plugins]

Warning

Not all plugins are available in every python version and platform. Specifying a plugin for in an unsupported environment will raise an error.

Install from Git repository

Obtain the Girder source code by cloning the Git repository on GitHub:

git clone --branch 2.x-maintenance https://github.com/girder/girder.git
cd girder

Note

Note, it is strongly recommended that downstream (i.e. for production or to support plugin development) users installing from Git track the 2.x-maintenance branch, as this branch will always point to the latest version (which is typically pre-release) in the 2.x.x series.

To run the server, you must install some external Python package dependencies:

pip install -e .

or:

pip install -e .[plugins]

to install the plugins as well.

Note

This will install the most recent versions of all dependencies. You can also try to run pip install -r requirements.txt to duplicate the exact versions used by our CI testing environment; however, this can lead to problems if you are installing other libraries in the same virtual or system environment.

To build the client-side code project, cd into the root of the repository and run:

girder-install web

This will run multiple Grunt tasks, to build all of the Javascript and CSS files needed to run the web client application.

Run

To run the server, first make sure the Mongo daemon is running. To manually start it, run:

mongod &

Then to run Girder itself, just use the following command:

girder-server

Then open http://localhost:8080/ in your web browser, and you should see the application.

Initial Setup

Admin Console

The first user to be created in the system is automatically given admin permission over the instance, so the first thing you should do after starting your instance for the first time is to register a user. After that succeeds, you should see a link appear in the navigation bar that says Admin console.

Enable Plugins

The next recommended action is to enable any plugins you want to run on your server. Click the Admin console navigation link, then click Plugins. Here, you can turn plugins on or off. Whenever you change the set of plugins that are enabled, you need to press the Rebuild and restart button at the top of the Plugins page to rebuild the web client and restart the server to apply the change.

For information about specific plugins, see the Plugins section.

Create Assetstore

After you have enabled any desired plugins and restarted the server, the next recommended action is to create an Assetstore for your system. No users can upload data to the system until an assetstore is created, since all files in Girder must reside within an assetstore. See the Assetstores section for a brief overview of Assetstores.

Installing third-party plugins

Girder ships with a standard library of plugins that can be enabled in the admin console, but it’s common for Girder installations to require additional third-party plugins to be installed. If you’re using a pip installed version of Girder, you can simply use the following command:

girder-install plugin /path/to/your/plugin

That command will expose the plugin to Girder and build any web client targets associated with the plugin. You will still need to enable it in the console and then restart the Girder server before it will be active.

Note

The girder-install plugin command can also accept a list of plugins to be installed. You may need to run it as root if you installed Girder at the system level.

For development purposes it is possible to symlink (rather than copy) the plugin directory. This is accomplished with the -s or --symlink flag:

girder-install plugin -s /path/to/your/plugin

Enabled plugins installed with -s may be edited in place and those changes will be reflected after a server restart.