With our system administrator sysadmin position eliminated, and the Digital Collections hosted on Heroku, we will be stand to drastically simplifying simplify our Ansible codebase. This puts a renewed new focus on those functions of Ansible that were not being used to maintain the Digital Collections: if . If we can get rid of them too, we can get rid of Ansible altogether.
One important function of Ansible that we currently But one thing we still need Ansible for is the provisioning of the ArchivesSpace server.
Current function
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Software on the ArchivesSpace server
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A ) The actual ArchivesSpace software proper.
B ) The code and files that export ArchivesSpace EADs and HTML finding aids (.
Lives in a GitHub repository
.At the moment, this code is badly in need of repair and updates
Badly needs repairs.
C ) An Apache server that serves the EADs and the HTML finding aids output by B )
The Othmer catalog links to the HTML files.
External links to the files, however, are rare. We do not need to provide redirects if we change them.
The EADs are consumed by CHSTM and UPenn. We will need to let them know about any changes.
Options
To entirely eliminate the ArchivesSpace server (and thus with it much of our dependency on the ArchivesSpace code in Ansible), we can take should consider one or more of the following steps:
A ) Move the ArchivesSpace software proper to a hosted provider. (we did this – ASpace is now living on LibraryHost.)
As part of this, we may also wish to (or have to) also update the version of ArchivesSpace we use.
We may also decide, as part of this work, to turn on the public user interface.
If we turn on the PUI, the HTML finding aids export code can and should be eliminatedbecome obsolete.
B ) Run the export scripts from a hosted environment. It may be possible to run them from a serverless environment, such as AWS lambda.
C ) Serve the EADs, and, if we still need them, the HTML finding aids, from an S3 bucket. This allows us to remove Apache from our setup altogether.
Notes:
It may also be possible to get ArchivesSpace to serve the EADs directly. If so, it may be possible to This is done: see export_archivesspace_xml
C ) Replace Apache with an S3 bucket. This is done: see export_archivesspace_xml
Notes
If an ArchivesSpace hosting provider, as part of their service, can take care of exporting and serving the EADs, we can avoid doing B ) and C ) altogether. We should keep this in mind as we shop.
Because the ArchivesSpace server is the only one left that we use Ansible for, each of these steps has the side-effect of cutting out big chunks of our Ansible code. For instance, C) should allow us to get rid of all our Apache-related code in Ansible.
A ), B ) and C ) above could be treated as independent projects and be done in any order.
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