Sysadmin

Please note that the sysadmin role is different from either a superuser or an administrator role. System administrators are they guys and gals who maintain the hardware and software pieces of Compass. Superusers and administrators have high level access to its content.

Welcome to the geeky side of Compass. This is where the standard system requirements are listed, just so you know what you’re getting into. The latest packages for syncing will always be listed in a local requirements file, so these are just general ball-park guidelines. If your institution does not currently run Compass, please contact us for more detailed set-up instructions.

Setup requirements

The hardware requirements for Compass are fairly low. A virtual machine (VM) with 2x CPU, 4GB RAM and 40GB disk is plenty. The software requirements are Ubuntu/Debian as OS, with software packages:

libjpeg-dev
libxml2-dev
libxslt1-dev
memcached

Compass is written in Django, Python, jQuery, Javascript, AJAX, and at present uses a PostgreSQL database. You’ll need to create a python virtual environment which includes the packages in your version of the requirements.txt file in order for it to run happily.