ESGF/CoG Administrator Guide Overview

The Earth System CoG Collaboration Environment has replaced the Web Front End as the public face to ESGF. This page describes the steps necessary to setup, configure, and maintain CoG for your ESGF node. It is intended to be used by existing ESGF Node administrators with root-level access.

Step 1a: Install CoG using the ESGF installer CoG is installed as part of a standard ESGF Index Node by running the ESGF installer. Currently, CoG is configured to run behind the Apache httpd server on the standard port SSL port 443 (redirection from port 80 will be configured soon). After the ESGF installer completes succesfully, check that you can access the node by typing the following URL in your favorite browser

Open URL: https//<hostname>/
Replace: <hostname> with your Node’s fully qualified domain name (note the “https” protocol).

This should redirect to https:////projects/testproject/

Step 1b: Upgrade CoG standalone

Alternatively, if you already have a working ESGF/CoG setup, you can upgrade CoG without running the full ESGF installer with the following procedure (as root, or prepend commands with sudo):

Stop the ESGF node: # /usr/local/bin/esg-node stop
But start Postgres: # /etc/init.d/postgresql start
Checkout the latest esg-cog script from GitHub (devel branch):
# cd /usr/local/bin
# wget 'https://github.com/ESGF/esgf-installer/blob/devel/cog/esg-cog'
Execute the script: # ./esg-cog
Stop Postgres: # /etc/init.d/postgresql stop
Restart the ESGF node: # /usr/local/bin/esg-node start

Step 2: Configure CoG

  • Once ESGF-COG is installed, the ESGF Node administrator must complete a sequence of one-time tasks to configure and customize the node.

  • These tasks can be completed at different times to progressively enhance the node functionality.

  • Please note that any configuration and content will be persisted across sub-sequent upgrades of the ESGF Node, but will be completely wiped out if the ESGF Node is re-installed from scratch (since CoG content is kept in the Postgres database, which will be erased by a total ESGF Node re-install). So, if you plan on later re-installing the whole Node from scratch, it is recommended to only follow steps 1-3 below to execute some basic post-installation testing. Proceed with the additional steps only when you believe that your Node installation is final, about to go into production, and you will only have to upgrade the Node, not re-install it.

    1. Login as ESGF/CoG Administrator

    2. Setup the Node Home Project

    3. Configure the Home Project Search

    4. Data Access Control Setup

    5. Customize the Node Header and Footer

    6. Customize Google Analytics

    7. Setup the ESGF Node Federation

    8. Configure Globus Downloads

    9. Setup Cron Jobs

    10. Local Shard Setup and Publishing

Additionally, the following pages contain additional content related to understanding and operating an ESGF-CoG node:

  • CoG-to-ESGF User Accounts

  • Restore from backup

Step 3: Upgrade CoG

In general, CoG upgrades are best executed within a complete ESGF release, by runinnig the full ESGF installer. But there might be situations where an ESGF Node administrator might want to install a new CoG version right away - for example, because a security patch or a new piece of functionality must be installed as soon as possible. CoG can be upgraded standalone by leveraging the ESGF installation infrastructure, simply by editing and executing the esg-cog script (as root):

cd /usr/local/bin
edit esg-cog: set VERSION=...whatever is the CoG version you want to install...
execute esg-cog: ./esg-cog
restart the node: ./esg-node restart

IMPORTANT: please note that the esg-cog script requires that the ESGF Postgres database be running while it executes. So either leave the whole ESGF node running, upgrade CoG, and then restart the node; or shut down the node but start up the Postgres database alone before running the upgrade script.