Link Digital are pleased to announce the general availability of CKAN 2.9 as a free Amazon Machine Image (AMI) on the AWS Marketplace.
Link Digital are co-stewards of the CKAN project and have provided free, open source CKAN images through the AWS Marketplace since early 2014. During that time hundreds of installations have been implemented world-wide, with over half of those occurring within the last two years.
The availability of CKAN 2.9 marks a major milestone in development, being the first version to support Python 3, since Python 2 reached it’s end-of-life in January.
Some of the new features this release of CKAN 2.9 are:
- Python 3.6, 3.7 and 3.8 support.
- Improved API security via it’s token system.
- A new package_revise API call allowing concurrent uploads / changes.
- Finer grained control of dataset permissions via Collaborators.
You can view the full changelog for CKAN 2.9 and 2.9.1 here.
Most CKAN extensions have already been updated to support Python 3 and thus CKAN 2.9. The following extensions come pre-packaged with our Marketplace image:
- Datastore – storage for structured data (think CSV) imported into CKAN.
- XLoader – used to load data into the Datastore. Previous versions used the Datapusher extension however XLoader has become the faster, more reliable option for this task.
- Geo View – provides plugins for Geospatial data views.
- Pages – allows you to create simple HTML pages within CKAN without the need for a third-party CMS.
- Harvester – allows datasets to be “harvested” or copied from remote CKAN portals on a schedule.
There are many more extensions that can be added to your CKAN portal with minimal effort. A good list and starting point is our Datashades organisation on GitHub where you will find such highlights as:
- SAML2 – enables Single Sign On (SSO) for your CKAN portal using SAML2 authentication.
- CloudStorage – provides the ability to use cloud storage like S3 or Azure to store your CKAN resources.
- Syndicate – lets you syndicate your local datasets to remote CKAN portals.
- Google Analytics – easily adds Google Analytics tracking codes to all parts of your CKAN portal.
When adding these or other extensions to your CKAN 2.9 portal, ensure you’re cloning the py3 branch for Python 3 support and follow the README instructions to install.
All in all, CKAN 2.9 is a big step forward for CKAN and the open data community as a whole. With Python 3 support nailed down, developers will be able to focus their efforts on new features and improvements that will benefit all users.
Link Digital is established globally as a leading developer and provider of support for CKAN based Open Data portals. For more information about enterprise class project development, implementation or support please contact us here.
