Installing Hermine for production

Getting the code

You can download latest releases from Hermine releases page or clone latest development version from GitLab:

git clone https://gitlab.com/hermine-project/hermine.git
cd hermine/

Major versions changes mean breaking changes, either in the installation configuration or in the API. You can find more information in CHANGELOG.md.

For minor or patch versions, it should be safe to update your instance by pulling the latest tag from the repository or downloading from the release page.

Docker Compose

Hermine provides a Docker Compose configuration with the following services:

a PostgreSQL database version 16
a gunicorn server for the Python backend
an optional Caddy server to deploy Hermine with HTTPS out-of-the-box

Beware this config is for docker compose (Compose v2) not for docker-compose (Compose v1).

Two profiles are available :

a default profile to use Hermine on a local machine or behind a reverse proxy (not suited for development)
an https profile where Caddy is configured with automatic HTTPS. It can easily be deployed on a VPS.

Configuration is made through a .env file which should be placed at the root of the project. Relevant configuration variables for Hermine image are exposed through Compose with the prefix HERMINE_. Check docker-compose.yml comments for more information.

At first launch, a superadmin user is created with admin / admin credential. You can update these credentials from http://example.com/admin/auth/user/.

In case you need to access the django-admin tool from outside Docker, you should use : docker exec -it hermine_django_1 /opt/hermine/manage.py

To automatically init the database with reference data, just put the shared.json file in the docker/ directory before starting the containers.

Default profile (to use locally or behind a reverse proxy)

You must set PORT instead of HERMINE_HOST variable.

# configure secret key
echo "HERMINE_SECRET=RANDOMSTRINGFORSECURITY" > .env
# configure port
echo "PORT=9000" >> .env
# optional : configure HOST if you plan to use Hermine behind a reverse proxy
echo "HERMINE_HOST=example.com" >> .env
# start the services in background
docker compose up -d

# Visit http://localhost:9000 and login with admin / admin

HTTPS profile (for deployment on a VPS)

You just need to set HERMINE_SECRET and HERMINE_HOST environment variables before you can start the containers. The easiest way to do so is to write it in a .env file.

# configure secret key
echo "HERMINE_SECRET=RANDOMSTRINGFORSECURITY" > .env
# optional : configure HOST if you use something else than localhost:80
echo "HERMINE_HOST=example.com" >> .env
# start the services in background
docker compose --profile https up -d

Hermine should be accessible at https://example.com. Caddy automatically sets up and renew HTTPS certificates.

To update your instance :

git switch main && git pull
docker compose --profile https up -d --build

Hermine Docker image

You can also use the Hermine Docker image to run Hermine in your own Docker environment, without using Docker Compose. You will need to set up your own PostgreSQL database (version 14 required, 16 or above is recommended), as well as a reverse proxy to serve static files and proxy other requests to the Docker image.

You first need to build the image :

docker build -t hermine .

Image configuration

Runtime configuration is made through environment variables. You can use a .env file to set them up.

The minimal configuration is :

SECRET: the secret key used by Django to sign session cookies
DJANGO_PORT: the port on which the container will listen for requests
POSTGRES_HOST: the hostname of the PostgreSQL database
POSTGRES_PORT: the port of the PostgreSQL database
POSTGRES_NAME: the name of the PostgreSQL database
POSTGRES_USER: the username to connect to the PostgreSQL database
POSTGRES_PASSWORD: the password to connect to the PostgreSQL database
SUPERUSER: the username of the superuser created at first launch
PASSWORD: the password of the superuser created at first launch
HOST: the external URL of your Hermine instance (ex: example.com), should be the same as the one used in the reverse proxy configuration
TRUST_PROXY_HEADERS: should be set to “True” as you are using a reverse proxy
STATIC_ROOT: the directory of the volume where static files will be stored

Optional configuration :

CSRF_TRUSTED_ORIGINS: a list of trusted origins for CSRF protection, defaults to [HOST]
THREADS: the number of threads used by gunicorn workers, defaults to number of CPU cores
MAX_UPLOAD_SIZE: the maximum size that the SBOM to import can be (in bytes), defaults to 10MB

Other configuration variables are available, you can find them in the docker-compose.yml file.

Example of command to run the container :

docker run -d \
  --name hermine \
  --env-file .env \
  hermine

Postgres Tips

It’s best practice to use a dedicated schema for each application and for specific users.

If you do this, you’ll need to change the default schema for the user configured in POSTGRES_USER (e.g. myUser) to be able to use your dedicated schema (e.g. mySchema). Otherwise, you may have problems, as your user shouldn’t have the right to create tables in the public schema.

ALTER ROLE myUser SET search_path TO mySchema;

Manual install

Install python dependencies

You should run Hermine in a Python virtual environment. Using poetry, you can create the virtual environment and install the dependencies with:

poetry install

Install and build front modules

npm install
npm run build

poetry run hermine/manage.py collectstatic

Configure your instance

Before the first run, you have to create a config.py file in the hermine/hermine/ directory.

cp hermine/hermine/config.default.py hermine/hermine/config.py

Update hermine/hermine/config.py according to your configuration. Ex: For development purposes, you can set HOST to 127.0.0.1 and DEBUG to True

Here are the parameters you may want to change in your hermine/hermine/config.py file

Parameter name	Description	Default value
HOST	The URL of your Hermine instance	“example.com”
MAX_UPLOAD_SIZE	The maximum size that the SBOM to import can be (in bytes)	1010241024
SECRET_KEY	The key that Django will use to encrypt data	“your-django-secret-key”
DEBUG	Enables debug functionality, should be disabled in production	False

Update the database structure and create a superuser :

# create database structure
poetry run hermine/manage.py migrate

# create a superuser
poetry run hermine/manage.py createsuperuser

Run the server

How you want to serve Hermine is up to you. You should be familiar with WSGI servers and reverse proxies. You can find more information in Django documentation.

A typical installation is :

Gunicorn or another WSGI server (running Hermine’s wsgi.py)
Nginx to proxy requests to Gunicorn and handle HTTPS

Static files are handled by Whitenoise, so you can serve them directly from your WSGI server. Otherwise, Hermine is not different from any other Django application. You can find more information in Django documentation.

For development purpose, you can simply run :

# run the server
poetry run hermine/manage.py runserver

OAuth

You can use an OAuth2 server as authentication backend by setting OAuth parameters.

For Docker installs, the following environment variables can be set :

OAUTH_CLIENT_ID
OAUTH_DOMAIN
OAUTH_CLIENT_SECRET
OAUTH_SCOPE: list of scope separated by ‘,’
OAUTH_ID_KEY
OAUTH_TOKEN_URL
OAUTH_AUTHORIZE_URL
OAUTH_USER_URL
OAUTH_USERNAME_PROPERTY (defaults to username)

On manual install, you should set these parameters in the config.py file.

Further information can be found in Python Social Auth’s documentation on which Hermine relies.

Users will be created on the fly at authentication by the OAuth server.

Health check

Hermine provides two test endpoints which you can use in your monitoring system.

/ping/ always send a 200 response, and can be used to check server availability.

/ready/ does the same but also tries to connect to Hermine database. It sends a 200 response if it succeeds.