A. If your RAMADDA site has been configured to send email (see here to configure email) then on the Login page you should see "Forget your User ID?" and "Forget your Password?" links.

A. In RAMADDA when there is a collection of checkboxes in a form (e.g., in the entry list or in the edit metadata form) selecting one and then selecting another with a Shift-Click toggles the range of checkboxes between the first the second checkbox clicked. Doing a Control-Click on a checkbox toggles all of them on or off.

A. To configure SSL access see here if you are running under Tomcat. See here if you are running stand-alone.

A. You can specify one or more properties in a .properties file in your RAMADDA home directory.

ramadda.httpheader1=<header name>:<header value>
ramadda.httpheader2=<header name>:<header value>  
...

e.g: For specifying HSTS Strict-Transport-Security header you would do:

ramadda.httpheader1=Strict-Transport-Security:max-age=86400; includeSubDomains

Once you restart your RAMADDA it is a good idea to check the headers, e.g. with curl:

curl -v "http://localhost:8080" > foo

A. RAMADDA has had the ability to uses Lucene for search indexing though up until 2021 this had been disabled by default. Lucene provides a much better search experience as it indexes the contents of files (e.g., pdfs, ppt, word, csv, etc) and provides better searching - supporting entry hierarchy based searching, synonyoms, etc. As of December 2021 RAMADDA now defaults to using Lucene. This can be overriden with the property:

ramadda.search.lucene.enabled=false

The problem this introduces is that, once enabled, the index does not get built with past content so a search will only show newly created content. To address this you can simply go to the Admin page: Admin->Maintenance->Reindex Lucene Index and select "Reindex all". Depending on the size of your repository this may take a few minutes but once complete your searching should be good to go.

A. By default RAMADDA serves up all of its CSS and Javascript files as individual files. You can improve page loading performance in by setting the following properties:

#This caches the HTML resources in memory
ramadda.cachehtdocs = false

#This serves up the JS and CSS files as aggregated minified files
ramadda.minified=true

#This uses the cdn.jsdelivr.net CDN network to deiver most of the CSS and Javascript files
ramadda.cdnok=true

A. For security reasons you can configure what IP addresses users are allowed to login from. In your repository.properties file in your local RAMADDA directory, e.g.,

<home>/.ramadda/repository.properties

add the property:

 Comma separated list of ip addresses (or prefixes) that are the ones where the user can login
 If blank then login is allowed from anywhere


ramadda.login.allowedips=


 e.g.:


ramadda.login.allowedips=127.0.0,201.43.72.5

A. When the following property is set then any user logging in must agree to the given terms.

ramadda.user.agree= Some terms
#.e.g:
ramadda.user.agree= I have read and agree to the terms of service

A. You need to comment out the ramadda.ssl.port property in your .properties file. Alternatively, you can run RAMADDA with the command line argument:

-Dramadda.ssl.ignore=true

A. The easiest way is to set a username/password in the repository.properties file in the RAMADDA home directory. Just add:

ramadda.admin=userid:password

and then restart RAMADDA. This sets the password for the given userid. Note: you should remove this entry once you have reset your password.

You can also specify an administrator user id and password from the command line when starting RAMADDA. If you are running RAMADDA stand alone then just provide the arguments:

-admin <user id> <password>

This creates a new user id if needed and sets the password.

If you are running RAMADDA under Tomcat then change the web.xml to pass in command line arguments using the "args" entry. This is a comma separated value list of the command line arguments that are processed by RAMADDA.

    <param-name>args</param-name>
    <param-value>-admin,userid,password</param-value>

A. Make a <anyname>.properties that contains:

override.ramadda.hostname=<good host name>

and place it in your ramadda home directory or plugins directory and restart ramadda. Once you are logged in go to the Admin Settings page and change the hostname then remove the properties file.

In general, you can override any property that has been set by defining a property with the "override." prefix.

A. You can configure your RAMADDA so that access via some specific hostname (e.g. http://boulderdata.org/) uses some entry. To do this first set a server property to enable this and restart your RAMADDA.

ramadda.enable_hostname_mapping = true

Then add an Alias property to the entry of interest with the value:

http://your_hostname
e.g.:
http://boulderdata.org

If you had different domains you can add multiple aliases -

http://www.boulderdata.org

This will use the entry as the root when accessing the repository under the given hostname. For example, the site http://boulderdata.org/ really just maps to an entry at - https://ramadda.org/repository/entry/show?entryid=79f24329-8c98-4d15-9804-821a70bfb606. Note: when searching under the alias the whole site will be searched.

A. RAMADDA can send email for both the password reset process and for monitoring new entries. On the main Site Administration page under the "Contact" area you can specify a SMTP server that RAMADDA will use to send email.

A. For more effective indexing of your site RAMADDA provides a built-in site map API:

/repository/sitemap.xml

By default this lists all of the entries under the top-level entry.

If you want specific entries in your site map then simply add an "Is in Site Map" property (Under the Add Property-> Thumbnails, Page Style, Etc.) menu for the entry or entries.

A. If you build from source then the build process will create a ~user/.ramadda/plugins directory and copy all of the plugins to that directory. The problem that can occur is if you are running your server and the RAMADDA home directory property goes missing then RAMADDA will default to use the ~user/.ramadda as the home dir if it exists. Now, if you are running the build say as root then the home dir will exist. If this occurs then anyone can hit your site and go through the installation process. To not allow this to happen create a file called not_for_server.txt and place it in the ~user/.ramadda directory that is getting created as part of the build but should not be used as the home directory. See the documentation.

A. The wiki facility supports embedding github commit history. github rate limites requests so your repository can only make a few requests at a time. You can increase this rate limit by creating a github personal access token at: https://github.com/settings/tokens. Add the property to your .properties file:

github.token=<your token>

A. See the documentation.

A. When RAMADDA is first installed it populates your repository with some initial folders and sets the description of the root entry with some initial text. You can override what entries are created and what the text is (for example, if you wanted to configure a number of different RAMADDA servers).

To change the description used just create a file initdescription.txt in the RAMADDA home directory. This file, if it exists, is read by RAMADDA. You can see the default one in the source tree at:

src/org/ramadda/repository/resources/examples/initdescription.txt

This file contains 2 macros:

${root} - the top-level URL path
${topid} - the ID of the root entry

To change what entries are created RAMADDA looks for a initentries.xml file in the RAMADDA home directory. The default file is:

src/org/ramadda/repository/resources/examples/initentries.xml

This is just the entries xml format. The ID of the top-level entry is simply "root", e.g.:

<entries>
<entry parent="root" name="Projects" type="group">
<description>A place to store projects</description>
</entry>
</entries>

A. There are a number of things you will need to do to run with content that is non-ascii (e.g., Chinese characters).

For Tomcat set the URIEncoding: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/138948/how-to-get-utf-8-working-in-java-webapps.

If you are running mysql there are some things you need to do. Postgres and Derby seem OK out of the box.

Your Java runtime should also have the system property -Dfile.encoding=utf-8 defined.

A. If you have harvested files into RAMADDA from your server file system and subsequently delete those files (e.g., scouring a real-time archive) RAMADDA will not delete the corresponding entries automatically. Instead, by default, RAMADDA will not show those kinds of entries to non logged in users but will show them to logged in users. However, no file download is available because the file is missing. To clean up these entries in RAMADDA you can manually delete the entries or you can set a property to automatically delete these types of entries.

ramadda.delete_entry_when_file_is_missing=true

Be careful with this. I (jeffmc) have seen remote file systems go down momentarily and if this had been set then all of my entries that I had harvested would have been deleted.

A. You can enable logging of entry activities by setting the property:

ramadda.logging.logactivityfile=true

When set various entry activities - view, file, data (providing data to a display) - are logged to a file:
<ramadda home>/logs/entryactivity.log