Clowder v2 (In active development)

For the previous version of Clowder, please see Clowder v1.

Clowder v2 is a reimagining of the Clowder research data management system using a different and newer technology stack. Clowder is a cloud native data management framework to support any research domain. Clowder was developed to help researchers and scientists in data intensive domains manage raw data, complex metadata, and automatic data pipelines.

While the Clowder v1 has worked well over the years, many of the underlying technologies and libraries have not received enough support in recent years and new developers have had a challenging time learning how to contribute to it. Clowder v2 is also an opportunity to leverage our experience working with research data in Clowder and deliver a better solution to common problems researchers encounter when working with data.

Clowder v2 provides:

• a better user experience and user interface
• an easier code base to pick up and modify written in Python/FastAPI and Typescript/React
• new features based on our experience working with researchers

Documentation

The v2 documentation is still work in progress. It's available at https://clowder2.readthedocs.io.

The v1 documentation is not fully compatible with v2, but it does provide some still relevant information. It is available at https://clowder-framework.readthedocs.io. There is a few other documentation links available on the website.

Installation

The easiest way of running Clowder v2 is checking out the code and running docker compose up in the main directory. If you would like to run Clowder with JupyterHub, you can use our script docker-prod.sh to start the services. Run ./docker-prod.sh prod up to start the services and ./docker-prod.sh prod down to stop them.

Helm charts are available for running Clowder v2 on Kubernetes. See the helm directory for more information.

Contributing

We are always looking for contributors. This could be anything from fixing bugs, adding new features, providing new feature requests, reccomending UI/UX improvements, helping with the documentation, or just testing the system and providing feedback. Here are a few ways to get started:

• Join our Slack channel, introduce yourself, and ask questions about the specific aspects of the system you are interested in.
• Submit an issue (bug or feature request) on the issue tracker.
• Submit a pull request with a bug fix or new feature. For larger changes, it's best to open an issue first or ask on Slack to discuss the changes.
• Develop new information extractors and/or visualizations.

Please follow our code of conduct when interacting with the community.

Support & Contacts

The easiest way to get in touch with us is Slack. This is a public forum. If you prefer email, you can contact us at clowder@lists.illinois.edu.

License

Clowder v2 is licensed under the Apache 2.0 license.