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Databox

The Databox platform is an open-source personal networked device, augmented by cloud-hosted services, that collates, curates, and mediates access to an individual’s personal data by verified and audited third party applications and services. The Databox will form the heart of an individual’s personal data processing ecosystem, providing a platform for managing secure access to data and enabling authorised third parties to provide the owner with authenticated services, including services that may be accessed while roaming outside the home environment. Databox project is led by Dr Hamed Haddadi (Imperial College) in collaboration with Dr Richard Mortier (University of Cambridge) and Professors Derek McAuley, Tom Rodden, Chris Greenhalgh, and Andy Crabtree (University of Nottingham) and funded by EPSRC. See http://www.databoxproject.uk/ for more information.

Getting Started

These instructions will get you a copy of the project up and running on your local machine. For development and testing purposes, see Development section below.

Prerequisites

  1. Requires Docker. Read here for docker installation.
  2. Once docker is installed and running, install docker-compose. Read here for installation.
  3. Requires Git (if it is not already on your machine). Read here for git installation.

Get started

  1. Clone Databox Git repo.
git clone https://github.com/me-box/databox.git

Operation

Make sure Docker is installed and running before starting Databox. Run the following to get your databox up and running.

cd databox
./databox-start

The above script pulls Databox pre-build images published on Docker hub and run Databox in your local machine.

Once it's started, point a web browser at https://127.0.0.1:8989 to access Databox UI.

To stop databox and clean up,

./databox-stop

Development

To develop on the platform and core components run the data-box start script with 'dev' parameter. See below.

./databox-start dev

Unlike using the pre-build images, this will clone all the relevant source repositories locally, and build them into the required Docker images. To try your component out, add your code into a directory with a Databox manifest and Dockerfile, and then add a reference to it in docker-compose-dev-local-images.yaml. Your image will then be built alongside the platform. To install your app, upload the manifest to the local app store on http://127.0.0.1:8181 and it should then become visible in the UI, ready for you to install.

Get Started with the Graphical SDK

The graphical SDK will allow you to quickly build and test simple databox apps. The current version of SDK run by default in dev mode. To start the sdk run:

./databox-start sdk

The SDK web UI is available at http://127.0.0.1:8086

To stop the SDK run:

./databox-stop sdk

Databox has a number of platform components, divided into two parts: Core and User components.

Core Components

User Components

Drivers

Apps

Libraries for writing drivers and apps

For writing a new driver or app for Databox, one needs Databox Api's. To make app/driver development easy, we have wrapped Databox api's in nodejs, python and go. Using any of these libraries, a developer can build their databox app/driver.

  • lib-node-databox: Databox nodejs api library for building databox apps and drivers.
  • lib-python-databox: Databox python api library for building databox apps and drivers.
  • lib-go-databox: Databox go api library for building databox apps and drivers.

API and System specifications

Databox System Design document can be find here and general API specifications are here.

Running the tests

./databox-test

For more details, have a look here.

Contributing

The databox project welcomes contributions via pull requests see CONTRIBUTING.md for more information. Good start is from having a look on the current issues and forking the databox repo and fixing bugs/issues and submitting a pull request. Read more on Fork and Pull here.

Versioning

This documentation is up-to-date till this commit. The master branches on all components points to the current release and are tagged in git using semver.

Authors

The list of contributors who participated in this project.

License

MIT Licence, See here.

Known issues

During development of system components and custom drivers

  • While building the platform and core components you can sometimes get an error:
TLS certificates invalid

This is caused when Databox is started before docker has cleaned up the networks.

This issue can be fixed if you run ./databox-start

  • In some cases, the time in docker containers on Mac can get out of sync with the system clock. This causes the HTTPS certs generated by the CM from being valid. See docker/for-mac#17. Fix this by restarting Docker for Mac.