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Version: 23.1

Docker Compose deployment

This guide assumes that all prerequisites have been met. Please visit the corresponding Prerequisites page for your infrastructure provider.

We recommend configuring your database or Redis details in either the tower.yml or the docker-compose.yml, but not both.

!!! note Database persistence In order for your DB or Redis volume to persist after a docker restart, uncomment the volumes key in the db or redis section of your docker-compose.yml file. Use this section to specify a local path to the DB or Redis instance.

Deploy Tower

Environment variables
  "docs/enterprise/_templates/docker/tower.env"
tower.yml
  "docs/enterprise/_templates/docker/tower.yml"
docker-compose.yml
  "docs/enterprise/_templates/docker/docker-compose.yml"
  1. Download and configure tower.env.

  2. Download and configure tower.yml, update values for allowed emails.

  3. Download and configure docker-compose.yml.

    The db and mail containers should only be used for local testing; you may remove them if you have configured these services elsewhere.

    Make sure to customize the TOWER_ENABLE_PLATFORMS variable to include the execution platform(s) you will use.

  4. Deploy Tower and wait for it to initialize (takes a few minutes):

    docker-compose up

For more information on configuration, see Configuration options.

Test the application

To make sure that Tower is properly configured, follow these steps:

  1. Login to Tower.

  2. Create an organization.

  3. Create a workspace within that organization.

  4. Create a new Compute Environment. Refer to Compute Environments for detailed instructions.

  5. Select Quick Launch from the Launchpad tab in your workspace.

  6. Enter the repository URL for the nf-core/rnaseq pipeline (https://github.com/nf-core/rnaseq).

  7. In the Config profiles dropdown, select the test profile.

  8. In the Pipeline parameters text area, change the output directory to a sensible location based on your Compute Environment:

    # save to S3 bucket
    outdir: s3://<your-bucket>/results

    # save to scratch directory (Kubernetes)
    outdir: /scratch/results
  9. Select Launch.

    You'll be transitioned to the Runs tab for the workflow. After a few minutes, you'll see the progress logs in the Execution log tab for that workflow.

Once you've made sure that Tower is configured correctly and you can launch workflows, you can run docker-compose up -d to deploy Tower as a background process. You can then disconnect from the VM instance.