Flip a Deployment

The NGDS CKAN distribution can be installed and deployed as either an aggregator or a publisher. Deployments differ in terms of utility: aggregators are used for harvesting data from remote servers and publishers are used for creating and exposing metadata packages.

There are cases where users will want to switch between deployments. Switching between deployments can be done without too much of a headache because the software stack for both deployments is exactly the same.

Here's how to do it, assuming everything was initially installed using this installation script:

1. Open up your CKAN configuration file in a text editor:

$ sudo nano /opt/ngds/etc/ckan/default/production.ini

2. Edit the ngds.deployment parameter:

# Press 'ctrl+w' to search for text
# Enter 'ngds.deployment' into search prompt
# Change deployment; 'node' for a publisher and 'central' for an aggregator

ngds.deployment = central (or) node

# Press 'ctrl+o' to save

3. Restart Apache to make the server aware of the changes:

$ sudo service apache2 restart