RDFIO Virtual Machine Setup or "Vagrant box"

This is an automatic setup script for setting up a Virtual Machine with MediaWiki (the software behind Wikipedia), Semantic MediaWiki (which adds structured data editing features to MediaWiki) and the RDFIO extension, which adds data import, export and querying support to Semantic MediaWiki.

It is very simple to use: Clone this git repository into a folder on you computer, install Vagrant, Ansible and Virtualbox (which are super easy to install on most systems), and then run vagrant up in the folder, and just wait for the script to do its job. See the installation section for more details.

In technical terms, this setup uses Vagrant as a wrapper, to allow starting the script with one simple command (vagrant up) and Ansible for doing the installation and configurations (often called "provisioning") in the background.

The fact that Ansible is used for provisioning, means that the installation instructions are easy to understand and change, and that they can be equally well installed elsewhere too, like in the cloud, or a local computer.

Updates

Sep 4, 2017: Our paper on RDFIO was just published:
Lampa S, Willighagen E, Kohonen P, King A, Vrandečić D, Grafström R, Spjuth O
RDFIO: extending Semantic MediaWiki for interoperable biomedical data management
Journal of Biomedical Semantics. 8:35 (2017). DOI: 10.1186/s13326-017-0136-y.

Installation

Prerequisites

The vagrant box requires the following softwares in order to set it up:

• Virtualbox
• Vagrant
• Ansible
• An SSH Client (Already included in Linux and OS/X)

For Ubuntu 16.04, we provide brief installation instructions for them below:

Virtualbox

Install on Ubuntu 16.04 with:

sudo apt-get install virtualbox

Vagrant

Install on Ubuntu 16.04 by downloading the debian installer and installing it:

wget https://releases.hashicorp.com/vagrant/1.8.1/vagrant_1.8.1_x86_64.deb
sudo dpkg -i vagrant_1.8.1_x86_64.deb

Ansible

N.B: Probably needs Ansible 2.x or higher! (Works well with 2.0.2, but not 1.7.2)

Install on Ubuntu 16.04 with:

sudo apt-get install ansible

Bring up the Vagrant box

Clone this repo:

git clone https://github.com/rdfio/rdfio-vagrantbox

Enter the cloned folder:

cd rdfio-vagrantbox

... and let vagrant take care of the rest:

vagrant up

Surf in to your new MediaWiki installation on:

• localhost:8080/w

Log in with "Admin" and "changethis".

Done!

To see the MediaWiki installation via the commandline, you can SSH in to your machine and enter the wiki installation folder like so:

vagrant ssh
cd /var/www/html/w

Known issues

After bringing up the vagrant box, you might see an error like this:

==> virtualbox: mesg: ttyname failed: Inappropriate ioctl for device

This is a minor glitch with vagrant, and nothing to worry about.