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Remote: Self-Hosted and Cloud

For remote and hosted deployments (both on a single machine or in the cloud), the only requirement is to have a designed domain and (strongly recommended, but not required) second domain for signing web archives.

We are also experimenting with Ansible playbooks for cloud deployment setups.

The production deployments also allow using an external mongodb server, and/or external S3-compatible storage instead of the bundled minio.

Single Machine Deployment with MicroK8S

For a single-machine remote deployment, we recommend using MicroK8s.

  1. Install MicroK8S, as suggested in the local deployment guide and ensure the ingress and cert-manager addons are also enabled.

  2. Copy cp ./chart/examples/microk8s-hosted.yaml ./chart/my-config.yaml to make local changes.

  3. Set the ingress.host, ingress.cert_email and signing.host fields in ./chart/my-config.yaml to your host and domain

  4. Set the super-admin username and password, and mongodb username and password in ./chart/my-config.yaml

  5. Run with:

helm upgrade --install -f ./chart/values.yaml -f ./chart/my-config.yaml btrix ./chart/

Single Machine Deployment with k3s

Another option for a single-machine remote deployment is k3s

  1. Install K3s, as suggested in the local deployment guide. Make sure to disable traefik which can be done by adding --no-deploy traefik to the systemd unit when installing k3s

  2. Install nginx-ingress with: helm upgrade --install nginx ingress-nginx/ingress-nginx -n ingress-nginx --create-namespace

  3. Install cert-manager. We recommend installing cert-manager through Jetpack, like so: 
helm repo add jetstack https://charts.jetstack.io
helm repo update

helm repo update jetstack
helm upgrade --install \
  cert-manager jetstack/cert-manager \
  --namespace cert-manager \
  --create-namespace \
  --version v1.12.0 \
  --set installCRDs=true

  1. Copy cp ./chart/examples/k3s-hosted.yaml ./chart/my-config.yaml to make local changes.

  2. Set the ingress.host, ingress.cert_email and signing.host fields in ./chart/my-config.yaml to your host and domain

  3. Set the super-admin username and password, and mongodb username and password in ./chart/my-config.yaml

  4. Run with:

helm upgrade --install -f ./chart/values.yaml -f ./chart/my-config.yaml btrix ./chart/

Using Custom Storage

If you would like to use existing external storage, such an existing S3-compatible storage, also set the default storage, for example:

minio_local: false

storages:
  - name: "default"
    access_key: <access key>
    secret_key: <secret key>

    endpoint_url: "https://s3.<region>.amazonaws.com/bucket/path/"

Note that this setup is not limited to Amazon S3, but should work with any S3-compatible storage service.

Using Custom MongoDB

If you would like to use an externally hosted MongoDB, you can add the following config to point to a custom MongoDB instance.

The db_url should follow the MongoDB Connection String Format which should include the username and password of the remote instance.

mongo_local: false

mongo_auth:
  db_url: mongodb+srv://...

Cloud Deployment

There are also many ways to deploy Browsertrix on various cloud providers.

To simplify this process, we are working on Ansible playbooks for setting up Browsertrix on commonly used infrastructure.

Ansible Deployment

Ansible makes the initial setup and configuration of your Browsertrix instance automated and repeatable.

To use, you will need to install Ansible on your control computer and then you can use these to deploy to Browsertrix on remote and cloud environments.

Currently, we provide playbooks for the following tested environments: