Ten days ago, I reported on a new deployment strategy for the InvenioRDM repository software. Using the Kamal deployment tool, I deployed both a staging instance of the Rogue Scholar service and a demo instance of the InvenioRDM Starter package. Over the last few days I have updated both instances to the latest release candidate (v13.0.0rc3) of the next major InvenioRDM software version.

The upgrade was fairly painless. It took me some time to update the customizations that I had made. The major issue working with Kamal that I reported before – specifying the hostname of the instance for security reasons (APP_ALLOWED_HOSTS) is still there, and my workaround still works (but ALLOWED_HOSTS was renamed to TRUSTED_HOSTS in v13). I ran into one major issue with the v13 upgrade: the recommended configuration for using externally registered DOIs no longer worked. It took me two patches in two different Invenio packages to fix this, and additional work is probably needed.

In addition to upgrading to the v13 release candidate, I made one big change in my InvenioRDM configuration: I stopped using S3 object storage and configured the local file storage. Neither the InvenioRDM Starter demo nor Rogue Scholar currently need to store large files (mostly community logos), and local storage seems to be better aligned with the Kamal deployment philosophy of deploying everything on one or more virtual machines running Docker.

For InvenioRDM Starter I have shifted from using demo data to importing existing metadata records from Crossref, DataCite, or other InvenioRDM instances, using the commonmeta library. For the current demo instance I decided to import about 1000 records of thesis metadata from both Crossref and DataCite, filtering by records that contain ROR metadata.

This approach worked well, helped by first importing the complete ROR vocabulary in InvenioRDM YAML format for funders and affiliations.

More work is needed for some new functionalities in v13, but I am confident that I can deploy Rogue Scholar and the InvenioRDM Starter demo instance to production as soon as InvenioRDM v13 is officially released. The ease of deploying updates and the initial performance looks really promising, and I look forward to working with Kamal. It is a promising platform for those smaller InvenioRDM instances that don't need Kubernetes. Please reach out to me if you have questions regarding Kamal and InvenioRDM, or if you want to deploy an InvenioRDM v13 instance with Kamal.

References

  1. Fenner, M. (2025, June 27). Kamal deploys InvenioRDM Starter to production. Front Matter. https://doi.org/10.53731/m7gng-jmm19
  2. Fenner, M. (2025, April 21). Working with the Research Organization Registry (ROR) Data Dump. Front Matter. https://doi.org/10.53731/f0g5b-68326