Quick reference

• Maintained by:
  Open Foris Initiative

• Documentation:
  Open Foris Arena Website

• Online platform:
  Open Foris Arena

• Where to get help:
  Open Foris Support Forum

What is Arena?

Arena is a cloud-based platform for storing and processing data collected in field inventories or questionnaires. It provides a fast and flexible way to set up a survey and start entering data for a team. It offers tools for data quality assurance with the help of data validation and reporting methods. Arena also offers multilingual data entry forms, multi-cycle data management, and computing of new result attributes and running statistical analysis with integrated connection to RStudio Server or local installation of RStudio.

Arena also offers a map with access to very-high resolution satellite images. The Arena Map can be used, for example, for verifying locations of collected data, and for conducting sample-based image interpretation.

Installation

Prerequisites

• download and install Docker. Docker is an open platform for developing, shipping, and running applications.

• Install a local database (PostgreSQL) as a Docker container. Run this command from command line; it will create also a database named 'arena' and a user 'arena' with password 'arena' and will make the DBMS listen on port 5444 (you can change those parameters as you wish):

$ docker run -d --name arena-db -p 5444:5432 -e POSTGRES_DB=arena -e POSTGRES_PASSWORD=arena -e POSTGRES_USER=arena postgis/postgis:12-3.0

You can also use an already existing PostgreSQL database installed in a different way and configure Arena to connect to it.

Prepare a file with the parameters to pass to Arena

The file (call it arena.env) must be a text file with this content:

# Default web server port
ARENA_PORT=9090

# DB
## specify the connection parameters as a URL in the format
## postgres://user:password@host:port/database
# DATABASE_URL=postgres://arena:arena@localhost:5444/arena
## or one by one
PGHOST=localhost
PGPORT=5444
PGDATABASE=arena
PGUSER=arena
PGPASSWORD=arena

# temporary uploaded files folder
TEMP_FOLDER=/home/your_user/openforis/arena/upload

# FILES STORAGE
## (if both FILE_STORAGE_PATH and FILE_STORAGE_AWS_S3_BUCKET_NAME are not specified, files will be stored in DB)

## FILES STORAGE (file system)
### path of a folder in the file system used to store files
FILE_STORAGE_PATH=

## FILES STORAGE (AWS S3 Bucket)
FILE_STORAGE_AWS_S3_BUCKET_NAME=
FILE_STORAGE_AWS_S3_BUCKET_REGION=
FILE_STORAGE_AWS_ACCESS_KEY=
FILE_STORAGE_AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY=

# Email service (Arena uses Sendgrid to send emails)
SENDGRID_API_KEY= # get it from https://sendgrid.com/

# Analysis
ANALYSIS_OUTPUT_DIR=/home/your_user/openforis/arena/analysis

# Server
## HTTP Session
## Secret used to sign the session ID cookie 
SESSION_ID_COOKIE_SECRET=my-cookie-secret-key

## Set to true if http requests must be forwarded to https
USE_HTTPS=false

# RStudio Server
RSTUDIO_DOWNLOAD_SERVER_URL=
RSTUDIO_SERVER_URL=
RSTUDIO_PROXY_SERVER_URL=
RSTUDIO_POOL_SERVER_URL=
RSTUDIO_POOL_SERVICE_KEY=

# reCAPTCHA v2 keys (get it from https://www.google.com/recaptcha/about/)
RECAPTCHA_SITE_KEY=
RECAPTCHA_SECRET_KEY=

# MAP
## Planet Lab Maps API key (get it from https://www.planet.com/markets/mapping/)
MAP_API_KEY_PLANET=

# System Admin user email address
# used to create default system admin user when DB is empty
# and to send emails to the users
ADMIN_EMAIL=
# Admin user password: used only when default system admin user is created the first time
# it MUST BE DELETED after the first startup
ADMIN_PASSWORD=

Install and run Arena

Running the following command from command line will install Arena as a Docker container:

$ docker run --env-file ./arena.env openforis/arena:latest

You can run this command in the same folder where you have defined the arena.env file or specify its path in the command, in the '--env-file' parameter. Arena will start on the port specified in the arena.env file (9090 by default). You can use the same command to start up Arena again once you stop it.

Open Arena in the browser

Once you started Arena with the previous command, you can open this address in your browser: http://localhost:9090

If the installation process was successful, the Arena login form should appear.

When Arena starts up the first time, a system admnistrator user is created using the parameters ADMIN_EMAIL and ADMIN_PASSWORD specified in the arena.env file, so you can use that email address and password to access Arena the first time. The password can be changed using the Change password function in Arena.

Run R Studio Server locally

To install RStudio Server as a Docker container run the following command (replace ANALYSIS_OUTPUT_DIR with the value of the ANALYSIS_OUTPUT_DIR environment variable):

$ docker run -d --name arena-rstudio --network=host -v ANALYSIS_OUTPUT_DIR:/home/rstudio -e DISABLE_AUTH=true rocker/rstudio

To restart RStudio server run

$ docker container restart arena-rstudio

Visit http://localhost:8787 in your browser to access the rStudio server instance.

License

Arena is MIT licensed.