This repo is designed to build a local development instance of REDCap on your laptop. It also includes a setup page to facilitate a rapid setup of REDCap using either your consortium credentials or a zip archive released by the REDCap team (that you might obtain from a collaborator at your institution).
This is intended to be one a rapid and easy way to run REDCap on your machine, be it a MAC, PC, or LINUX distribution. It is also intended to be easily upgraded (e.g. change PHP version, change MYSQL version, etc..). That said, it does use Docker - a technology for containerizing applications that may require some learning if it is new to you.
This is not intended to be used as a production server, although many institutions do run production services via docker containerized images.
Should you want to run this in any 'exposed' server, be sure to edit the redcap.ini file in the override-web/php folder
to have production-ready php settings.
- Mailpit to capture outbound email on your server for review
- X-Debug support for detailed server-side inspection
- PhpMyAdmin support for easy database maintenance / backups / restores (no longer active by default -- it has been replaced with Adminer - a simple script for doing basic database access)
- Easy to modify php-version or mysql-version and rebuild your environment in minutes
- Install Docker Desktop (requires docker account which is free)
- Download this repository and unzip it to your computer. You can chose to use the master branch or you can pick a specific release.
- Unzip the file to a good location (maybe
~/REDCap) and open the directory using a good IDE, such as: phpStorm, Visual Studio Code, Atom - does not support xdebug, etc... ) - Copy/Rename the
.env-exampleto make a.envfile - it is located in therdcfolder, next REVIEW the.envcontents, making changes as necessary. - Once
.envfile settings are correct, from therdcfolder type$ ~/REDCap/rdc> docker compose up -d - Open your web browser and goto
http://localhost(or, in some cases with macshttp://127.0.0.1) and follow directions for further installation
DOCKER_PREFIX variable otherwise you may corrupt your existing installation. Please see the full docs for more detail
If you have an existing REDCap Docker Compose development setup and wish to switch to the latest version, please review the section in the detailed documentation
See the detailed documentation for more information! Keep in mind this is a community effort so feedback is appreciated. Please create issues here with any suggestions or make a pull request with improvements.
- 2024-10-23 Added instructions for setting up local SSL environment, cleaned up vhost setups
- 2024-10-21 Upgraded to php 8.3 and added adminer as alternate db access tool, and commented out phpMyAdmin by default
- 2024-10-17 Replaced mailhog with mailpit - a supported variant to handle mail better
- 2022-10-06 Did some cleanup to allow for M1 (ARM) support and Intel without changes
- 2022-02-16 Made defaults php 8.1, mysql 8.0, xdebug 3.1.3 and incorporated some pull requests
- 2020-12-28 Made defaults php7.4, xdebug 3.0, mysql 8
- 2020-09-24 Minor documentation cleanup and testing for Windows
- 2019-10-03 Improved documentation and cleanup of unused settings (issue #4)
- 2019-09-06 Removed ssmtp and replaced with msmtp
- 2019-06-06 Add X-Debug configuration.
- 2019-01-24 Changed folder layout and optimized unzipping after upload to be much faster
- 2018-08-19 Added .env file and added UID override for MAC users to maintain file ownership (see .env)
- 2018-08-04 Added support for auto-install from
redcapx.y.z.zip - 2018-08-01 Major refactoring into docker-compose 3
Copyright (c) 2024 Andrew Martin Licensed under the MIT license.
Please make pull requests to extend the functionality and documentation
I'd like to thank the many people who have contributed to making this repo better!