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The home directory

The home directory is a docker volume named rapidminer-server-home – see the installation guide to install and start using Altair AI Hub. All data and directories created and used by Altair AI Hub, like the home directory, reside within this volume. This document outlines the purpose of the various files and subdirectories within the home volume.

What is the home directory?

The home directory is where your AI Hub Server configuration and data is stored. In particular, it stores the contents of the projects, including all user data that was uploaded from Altair AI Studio and generated via processes.

What does the home directory contain?

To get access to the home directory, read Editing files within containers: the home directory.

Your home directory contains the following directories and files:

Path Description
.RapidMiner/ Execution context directory used by the Server Core.
data/ Data directory which contains persistent data like the repository content and caches.
data/git_server/ Contains the Project content.
data/git_lfs_server/ Contains the Project large files content.
config/ Contains application configuration.
resources/jdbc/ Contains externally installed JDBC drivers.
resources/extensions/ Contains extensions used by Altair AI Hub. See how to install extensions for more information.
resources/licenses/ Contains the RapidMiner license(s).
resources/libs/ Contains custom Java libraries which are used in processes.
log/ Contains log files.

Handling disk space

By default, all user generated contents like processes, models or data sets will be put inside the home directory. As those contents can grow in size depending on your users' use of Projects, we advise to always have enough space left on the disk which is hosting the home directory.

In addition to regularly checking disk space availability as admin, AI Hub Server provides two safety mechanisms to reject uploading any items which would exceed available disk space when using Projects. By default, at least five gigabytes are required to be available for the underlying Git and LFS storage. Although the default values should provide an adequate safety, checks can be disabled or configured further with the help of the deployment's environment. Adjust to your liking if needed.

REPOSITORIES_GIT_ENABLE_DISKSPACE_CHECK_HOOK = true
REPOSITORIES_GIT_DISKSPACE_CHECK_THRESHOLD = 5120M
REPOSITORIES_LFS_ENABLE_DISKSPACE_CHECK = true
REPOSITORIES_MIN_LFS_DISKSPACE_CHECK_THRESHOLD = 5120M

Securing the home directory

The Projects' data and other configuration files all contain information that may be considered secret (server settings, Project content, database passwords, etc).

For production use, we strongly recommend that you secure this volume against unauthorized access.

We recommend the following precautions:

  • Assign a separate restricted user account on the machine running Altair AI Hub (not a root/administrator user)

    If you wish to run Altair AI Hub on port 80, use a reverse proxy server like Apache HTTP Server or nginx (do not run as root/Administrator if security of the home directory is important to you)

  • Ensure that only the user running Altair AI Hub can access the home directory, and that this user has read, write and execute permissions, by setting file system permissions appropriately for your operating system.

  • Ensure that your file system is encrypted (e.g. via eCryptfs, dm-crypt, EFS or FileVault)

Technical notes

  • One home volume per Altair AI Hub instance!

    You can only have one home volume per Altair AI Hub installation. If you have multiple AI Hub installations, you will need to set up a home volume for each installation or share them cross network via proper means.

  • The home directory contains the projects' contents. As this content can be uploaded by the user the file system needs to support the UTF-8 charset encoding. Example configuration for Linux via /etc/environment:

      export LANG=en_US.UTF-8
      export LANGUAGE=en_US:en
      export LC_ALL=en_US.UTF-8
    
  • As noted above, data/git_.../ contains the Projects content being managed by Altair AI Hub. We strongly recommend that customers never modify it, nor interact with it directly.