Dockerised REDCap Installation for Research Data Management

Running REDCap locally on your PC shouldn’t be fragile or painful. In this post, I walk through how I Dockerised REDCap to create a portable, reproducible, and easy-to-maintain research data platform on my laptop.

Pre-requisite

1. Docker and docker composed installed. Follow the offical documentation for installation guide
2. A valid licence from the REDCap consortium.
3. Git installed
4. Access to the redcap source files zipped

Steps

• First, lets create a working directory to put everything in one place.

mkdir redcap-project
cd redcap-project/

• Andy123 has this nice repository with a docker compose file for configuring redcap inside docker. Let clone the project using the following git command

git clone git@github.com:123andy/redcap-docker-compose.git .

• We need to configure the redcap application to our own preference. To do this we need to edit the .env file localated in the path rdc directory. We can make a copy of the .env-example file given to set our configurations

  cd rdc
  cp .env-example .env
  nano .env
  

  Read the settings defined in the file. The follow are key to ensure redcap works properly

• id variable should be set to your user assigned id on your computer. You can run the following shell to get your id

id -u

• Set where redcap web app should be runned from, by default it is the root / directory. you can specify a different path
  REDCAP_WEBROOT_PATH = /redcap/

• To secure your installation, you need to specify a salt value for cryptographic functions within redcap.You can generate one here REDCAP_SALT=MbtCG+xIfgn/fAY/F5xcwQKU1YadtnSo

• Set a strong password for the following database parameters. You can use lastpass to generate strong passwords and store them securely inside the lastpass vault

  • MYSQL_PORT=3306
  • MYSQL_ROOT_PASSWORD=Strong Password
  • MYSQL_DATABASE=redcap
  • MYSQL_USER=redcap
  • MYSQL_PASSWORD=Strong password
• Now lets Go Build the Image. This might take some time. Coffee break!

cd rdc
docker compose build

If everything runned successfully, you shouldn’t get any errors. If you make changes to the docker-compose.yml file, I strongly recommend you run docker compose build –no-cache

docker compose build --no-cache

the above command will ensure the docker images are rebuild from scratch.

• Verify you have the image build by using the following docker command

docker images -a

• With the docker images build successfully, it’s time we spin some container off of them. The first time the containers are runned may take some time.

cd rdc
docker compose up -d

• You can view the logs from the container using the command

docker compose logs -f

• To test if everything worked as expected, visit http://localhost or http://127.0.0.1 to verify if the webbrowser is working.

• You can change how you access the web app by using a custom domain name like redcap.local. To achieve this, edit your hosts file and create a mapping for localhost as shown below

sudo nano /etc/hosts
127.0.0.1   redcap.local

You should be able to access redcap via http://redcap.local

• With the web app running, it’s about time you get a copy of the redcap source zip file. You can get it here if you’re a member of the consortium. and use it to complete the redcap installation.

In the part 2 of the post, we will walk through a typical redcap upgrade using our dockerised environment