Hardware Recommendations

You can install and run VIVO on most modern PC, laptop, or server hardware. Whilst the application layer needs a reasonable amount of memory, the majority of the workload is placed on the storage layers, which as a semantic web application means the triple store. As VIVO aims to be agnostic to the triple store, the precise requirements will depend on your choice of triple store. However, the default configuration is to use Jena SDB backed by MySQL - in this setup, it is recommended that you have very high IO bandwidth for the file system used by MySQL, and significant memory for caching layers of the database engine.

Minimum Specification

Recommended Specification

Prerequisite Software

Java 1.7 or later

Maven 3.0.3 or later

An SQL Database

System Requirements (*)

Operating System

VIVO is largely agnostic to the OS that it is running on - as a Java application, it is dependent on having a Java Virtual Machine and a Tomcat servlet container. It should be possible to install and run VIVO on any OS where you are able to provide all of the other software requirements.

However, most sites will run their installations on a Linux server, and you may find that it is easier to follow the installation instructions on a Linux / UNIX variant. Notably, if you are running Windows, you may need to stop running processes (e.g. Tomcat) in order to complete some of the instructions, due to file locking semantics on Windows.

Java 1.7 or later

Maven 3.0.3 or later

The installation mechanism uses Maven to package and deploy the VIVO application and other necessary files. Additionally, the development environment also uses Maven to compile the and package the code.

The minimum version of Maven required is 3.0.3, although it is better to use a more recent version of the 3.x releases where possible.

Maven can be downloaded from the following location: http://maven.apache.org/download.html, although you may use a version supplied by your operating system / package manager, providing it meets the minimum requirements.

Configuring a Proxy

You can configure a proxy to use for some or all of your HTTP requests in Maven. The username and password are only required if your proxy requires basic authentication (note that later releases may support storing your passwords in a secured keystore‚ in the mean time, please ensure your settings.xml file (usually ${user.home}/.m2/settings.xml) is secured with permissions appropriate for your operating system).

Example:

<settings>
  .
  .
  <proxies>
   <proxy>
      <active>true</active>
      <protocol>http</protocol>
      <host>proxy.somewhere.com</host>
      <port>8080</port>
      <username>proxyuser</username>
      <password>somepassword</password>
      <nonProxyHosts>www.google.com|*.somewhere.com</nonProxyHosts>
    </proxy>
  </proxies>
  .
  .
</settings>

An SQL database - e.g. MySQL / MariaDB (or any other supported by Jena SDB)

Tomcat