Girder on Ubuntu 24.04 LTS

Overview

Girder is a free, open source data management platform from Kitware. It gives research groups, imaging labs and data engineering teams one place to store, organise, share and serve large collections of files. Data is arranged in a clear hierarchy of collections, folders, items and files, any object can carry searchable metadata, and access is controlled per user and per group, so a single deployment can host open reference data alongside restricted project data.

Storage itself is pluggable. Girder writes file content into assetstores, which can be a local filesystem volume or Amazon S3 compatible object storage, so the catalogue and its permissions stay in one place while the bytes live wherever suits the workload. Because every action in the web interface is also a REST call, and an official Python client exists for bulk transfers, ingest pipelines, reporting and instance to instance mirroring can be fully scripted. Girder is equally a finished application and a backend to build a domain specific data portal on top of.

Common uses

• Give a research group a shared, access controlled home for large datasets
• Serve files and metadata to applications through a documented REST API
• Keep a searchable catalogue while file content lives on object storage

See it running

Real screenshots taken while testing this image against its deployment guide.