Getting started
Once you’ve finished installing CKAN, this section will walk you through getting started with your new CKAN website, including creating a CKAN sysadmin user, some test data, and the basics of configuring your CKAN site.
Creating a sysadmin user
You have to use CKAN’s command line interface to create your first sysadmin user, and it can also be useful to create some test data from the command line. For full documentation of CKAN’s command line interface (including troubleshooting) see Command Line Interface (CLI).
Note
CKAN commands are executed using the ckan
command on the server that
CKAN is installed on. Before running the ckan commands below, you need to
make sure that your virtualenv is activated and that you’re in your ckan
source directory. For example:
. /usr/lib/ckan/default/bin/activate cd /usr/lib/ckan/default/src/ckan
You have to create your first CKAN sysadmin user from the command line. For
example, to create a new user called seanh
and make him a sysadmin:
ckan -c /etc/ckan/default/ckan.ini sysadmin add seanh email=seanh@localhost name=seanh
You’ll be prompted to enter a password during account creation.
Or, if you already have an existing user, you could promote him to a sysadmin:
ckan -c /etc/ckan/default/ckan.ini sysadmin add seanh
For a list of other command line commands for managing sysadmins, run:
ckan -c /etc/ckan/default/ckan.ini sysadmin --help
Read the Sysadmin guide to learn what you can do as a CKAN sysadmin.
Creating test data
It can be handy to have some test data to start with, to quickly check that
everything works. You can add a random set of test data to your site from the
command line with the following generate fake-data
commands:
ckan -c /etc/ckan/default/ckan.ini generate fake-data organization # check the output and save the ID of organization into variable: owner_org=<Organization ID from the previous command> ckan -c /etc/ckan/default/ckan.ini generate fake-data dataset --owner_org=$owner_org
If you later want to delete this test data and start again with an empty database, you can use the db clean command.
For a short description of this subcommand, run:
ckan -c /etc/ckan/default/ckan.ini generate fake-data --help
Config file
All of the options that can be set in the admin page and many more can be set
by editing CKAN’s config file. By default, from CKAN 2.9 the config file is
located at /etc/ckan/default/ckan.ini. (For older versions, the config file is located at
/etc/ckan/default/development.ini or /etc/ckan/default/production.ini). The config file can be edited in any
text editor. For example, to change the title of your site you would find the
ckan.site_title
line in your config file and edit it:
ckan.site_title = Masaq Data Hub
Make sure the line is not commented-out (lines in the config file that begin
with #
are considered comments, so if there’s a #
at the start of a
line you’ve edited, delete it), save the file, and then restart your web server
for the changes to take effect. For example, if using a CKAN package install:
sudo supervisorctl restart ckan-uwsgi:*
For full documentation of CKAN’s config file and all the options you can set, see Configuration Options.
Note
If the same option is set in both the config file and in the admin page, the admin page setting takes precedence. You can use the Reset button on the admin page to clear your settings, and allow settings from the config file to take effect.