Looking for Treehouse data on Xena?
➜ treehouse.xenahubs.net

xenahub

Stand-alone Dockerized Xena Hub

Requirements:

• docker
• docker-compose
• make (optional)

Notes

You will need to provide a certificate file and keyfile. They should be placed in the xena/certs subdirectory. (When running in standalone mode. See below for running behind a reverse proxy.)

The hub must be accessible at the URL that the certificate is for. Otherwise you will get an "ERR_CERT_COMMON_NAME_INVALID" error.

Hosted Files

To load a data file into xenahub, you will need two files:

• the TSV data file itself, eg example.tsv. This must not be gzipped.
• a json-formatted metadata file, eg example.tsv.json. Xena's FAQ provides details on the format.

Place both of these in thexenahub/xena/files directory. Then, from the xenahub directory, run:

make load file=example.tsv

The request will complete within a few seconds and the file will then load asynchronously into the xena db. Leave the TSV file within the files subdirectory, or the download link on its xena page will not work.

For backups of the metadata for Treehouse's hosted files, see the reference-file-info repo.

Root-Squash

If your xena files are stored on an NFS mount that has been "root-squashed", it is a little bit complicated to make the permissions work.

The way I am doing it is to make everything group-readable, then run the docker with user root (the default) but the same group id as the group on the host. You will have to edit your docker-compose.yml file to update the group ID to the correct one. To find the desired group id:

getent group GROUPNAME

If you get the following error, set the xena dir to be group-writable:

Error opening database: "Could not save properties /root/xena/database.lock.db"

Running behind Apache reverse proxy

This is how to set it up on a shared server running on a high-level port, with Apache proxying to it. Instructions may be approximate.

DNS

Set up a CNAME to your shared server with your hub URL:

xenahub.example.com 28800 CNAME sharedserver.example.com

Apache

Apache is responsible for holding the certificates for the xenahub.example.com site in this mode. For example, store in /etc/httpd/xena_certs: chain.crt xena.crt xena.csr xena.key

Then, in /etc/httpd/conf.d/ssl.conf, include the following VirtualHost. This will send https requests to Xena's 7223 (https) port. ProxyPreserveHost ensures that xena knows that its hostname is xenahub.example.com instead of 127.0.0.1.

<VirtualHost *:443>
  ServerName xenahub.example.com
  SSLEngine on
  SSLProtocol all -SSLv2 -SSLv3
  SSLCipherSuite HIGH:3DES:!aNULL:!MD5:!SEED:!IDEA
  SSLCertificateFile /etc/httpd/xena_certs/xena.crt
  SSLCertificateKeyFile /etc/httpd/xena_certs/xena.key
  SSLCertificateChainFile /etc/httpd/xena_certs/chain.crt

  ProxyRequests Off
  ProxyPreserveHost On
  SSLProxyEngine On
  SSLProxyVerify none
  SSLProxyCheckPeerCN off
  SSLProxyCheckPeerName off
  SSLProxyCheckPeerExpire off
  ProxyPass "/"  "https://127.0.0.1:7223/"
  ProxyPassReverse "/"  "https://127.0.0.1:7223/"
</VirtualHost>

Xena Docker

For behind reverse proxy, you will want to use the no-certs configuration & docker build. This is currently the default.