CKAN is a powerful data management system that makes data accessible – by providing tools to streamline publishing, sharing, finding and using data. CKAN is aimed at data publishers (national and regional governments, companies and organizations) wanting to make their data open and available.

I’m going to show you how to install CKAN on a CentOS 7 box using Docker images.
Docker is an open platform for developers and sysadmins to build, ship, and run distributed applications. By “Dockerizing” the app platform and its dependencies, you can abstract away differences in OS distributions and underlying infrastructure.

Let’s start from a fresh CentOS 7 installation (minimal ISO will do fine).
Enable EPEL repository:

rpm -Uvh http://www.nic.funet.fi/pub/mirrors/fedora.redhat.com/pub/epel/beta/7/x86_64/epel-release-7-0.2.noarch.rpm

Fetch and install docker
yum install docker

start it:
service docker start

make it start at boot:
chkconfig docker on

Now it’s time to tell Docker to download 3 images we need to run CKAN: ckan core, PostgreSQL and Apache Solr.

Use the following line to make all in a blow:
echo postgresql solr ckan | xargs -n 1|while read img; do docker pull ckan/$img; done

You should see something like this happening:

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Look at the images downloaded:

docker images
REPOSITORY          TAG                 IMAGE ID            CREATED             VIRTUAL SIZE
ckan/ckan           latest              7c63bc15a452        7 weeks ago         771.2 MB
ckan/postgresql     latest              192057470cf4        8 weeks ago         429 MB
ckan/solr           latest              3a9ee0bc7fe7        10 weeks ago        758.4 MB

Time to start each image in a separate container (specifying a name for each container):
docker run -d --name db ckan/postgresql && docker run -d --name solr ckan/solr && docker run -d -p 80:80 --link db:db --link solr:solr ckan/ckan

Check that everything is running:

docker ps
CONTAINER ID        IMAGE                    COMMAND               CREATED              STATUS              PORTS                NAMES
46af1ba28dd5        ckan/ckan:latest         /sbin/my_init         About a minute ago   Up About a minute   0.0.0.0:80->80/tcp   goofy_sammet0             
f4b93a4e8b6c        ckan/solr:latest         java -jar start.jar   About a minute ago   Up About a minute   8983/tcp             goofy_sammet0/solr,solr   
5c5721b2a18f        ckan/postgresql:latest   /usr/local/bin/run    2 minutes ago        Up 2 minutes        5432/tcp             db,goofy_sammet0/db

Some useful Docker commands:

Open a bash shell in a running container:
docker run -i -t ckan/ckan /bin/bash

Stop all running containers:
docker stop $(docker ps -a -q)

Start containers and run images (without specifying name for each container):

docker start db solr
docker run -d ckan/postgresql
docker run -d ckan/solr
docker run -d -p 80:80 --link db:db --link solr:solr ckan/ckan

Add an administrator account to your CKAN:

docker run -i -t --link db:db --link solr:solr \
    ckan/ckan \
    /sbin/my_init -- \
    /bin/bash -c \
    '$CKAN_HOME/bin/paster --plugin=ckan sysadmin -c $CKAN_CONFIG/ckan.ini add administrator'

then press y and type a password.

Insert test data in CKAN:
docker run -i -t --link db:db --link solr:solr     ckan/ckan     /sbin/my_init --     /bin/bash -c     '$CKAN_HOME/bin/paster --plugin=ckan create-test-data -c $CKAN_CONFIG/ckan.ini'

Find your PostgreSQL IP address:

docker inspect --format {{.NetworkSettings.IPAddress}} db
172.17.0.51

If you want to connect to your PostgreSQL DB instance remember that default postgresql user/pass are: ckan/ckan
docker run -i -t ckan/postgresql /bin/bash -c 'psql -h 172.17.0.51 -U ckan'
enter password ckan at prompt

!!Don’t do it now!!
If you want to remove all containers (when they are already stopped):
docker rm $(docker ps -a -q)

!!Don’t do it now!!
To remove all images:
docker rmi $(docker images -q)

At last, connect to your CKAN instance via a web browser, login as administrator, start adding contents and making customizations.

This is just a quick guide to make you started configuring CKAN and not intended to use in a production environment. You are warmly encouraged to read all the background documents and the manuals as well.