Building

Ontotext provides prebuild images with every release of GraphDB. These images are available at Docker Hub.

If you want to make changes to the image you can build it from this repository. To build the image you can use the provided Makefile or simply invoke the docker image build command directly. Note that there is a version build argument that must be provided. When using make this parameter will automatically be picked up from the VERSION variable.

For example, if you want to build version 10.7.0, you can run the following command:

make build VERSION="10.7.0"

Persisting data

Preload a repository

The GraphDB image is configured to store its data to /opt/graphdb/home. Also, the default server import directory is $HOME/graphdb-import, but this could be changed using the graphdb.workbench.importDirectory configuration property.

To map directories from the host use:

docker container run -it -p 7200:7200 \
  -v /host/path/for/graphdb/data:/opt/graphdb/home \
  -v /host/path/for/graphdb/imports:/root/graphdb-import \
  ontotext/graphdb:10.7.0

To do the same but using volumes, we need to create the volumes first.

docker volume create graphdb-data
docker volume create graphdb-import

docker container run -it -p 7200:7200 \
  -v graphdb-data:/opt/graphdb/home \
  -v graphdb-import:/root/graphdb-import \
  ontotext/graphdb:10.7.0

GraphDB configurations can be provided using the graphdb.properties file, using the GDB_JAVA_OPTS environment variable, or directly as command line arguments.

The GDB_JAVA_OPTS environment variable could also be used to configure GraphDB. Its value must be a list of space separated key=value pairs prefixed by -D, following the java system properties syntax.

docker container run -it -p 7200:7200 \
  -e GDB_JAVA_OPTS="-Dgraphdb.workbench.importDirectory=/var/graphdb/import" \
  ontotext/graphdb:10.7.0

docker container run -it -p 7200:7200 \
  ontotext/graphdb:10.7.0 -Dgraphdb.workbench.importDirectory=/var/graphdb/import -Dgraphdb.home=/opt/graphdb/home

Setting a license file

There are several ways to set a license for GraphDB.

When running inside a container, the best way is using a file.

Either mount the file as graphdb.license under the conf/ directory

docker container run -it -p 7200:7200 \
  -v /path/to/my-graphdb.license:/opt/graphdb/home/conf/graphdb.license \
  ontotext/graphdb:10.7.0

or mount it to an arbitrary path and the GraphDB where it is

docker container run -it -p 7200:7200 \
  -v /path/to/my-graphdb.license:/etc/graphdb/graphdb.license \
  -e GDB_JAVA_OPTS="-Dgraphdb.license.file=/etc/graphdb/graphdb.license" \
  ontotext/graphdb:10.7.0

Using the importrdf tool

The importrdf command line tool can be used to load big amounts of data.

Note that GraphDB should be stopped before using the tool. The tool also requires a valid license.

To run the tool we need to override the image entrypoint, because by default, it starts GraphDB. We also need to map any files needed for the import.

docker container run -it -p 7200:7200 \
  -v /path/to/my-graphdb.license:/opt/graphdb/home/conf/graphdb.license \
  -v $PWD/preload:/graphdb-data-import \
  --entrypoint /opt/graphdb/dist/bin/importrdf \
  ontotext/graphdb:10.7.0 \
  preload -Dgraphdb.home=/opt/graphdb/home -f -c /graphdb-data-import/repo-config.ttl /graphdb-data-import/data.nt 

Note that this example uses files from this repository, so make sure you run the command from the repository root directory. Also, as mentioned above, we need to provide the graphdb.home configuration property, since we are overriding the default arguments used by GraphDB.

What this command does is:

1. Mount the GraphDB license to /opt/graphdb/home/conf/graphdb.license
2. Mount the preload directory from this repository to /graphdb-data-import
3. Override the image entrypoint to the importrdf tool
4. Configure the GraphDB home directory
5. Finally, run importrdf preload command, which will
   1. Create a repository using the repo-config.ttl file
   2. Import the test.nt file in that repository