RSE Global Environment

The following environment variables can be set to determine runtime behavior.

RSE_CONFIG_FILE

If set, identify your Research Software Encyclopedia by way of the path to this file.

export RSE_CONFIG_FILE=/path/to/rse.ini

By doing so, you can interact with your software repository via rse.ini without needing to specify --config_file.

RSE_WORKERS

the number of multiprocessing workers to use. This value is set to be 2*2nproc + 1 if not set.

RSE_SHELL

The default shell for an interactive client (defaults to ipython, then checks python, and bpython)

The default endpoint to retrieve criteria and taxonomy information. Defaults to https://rseng.github.io/rseng/api to provide each of:

• https://rseng.github.io/rseng/api/taxonomy/
• https://rseng.github.io/rseng/api/criteria

RSE_DATABASE

the database to use. For example, you can specify just filesystem or sqlite, or postgresql or mysql+pymysql for mysql. For the last three, you can optionally specify RSE_DATABASE_STRING to include a particular set of credentials needed for access, and this is recommended over providing the values into the rse.ini config for a software repository. To export a particular database type, here are examples:

export RSE_DATABASE=mysql+pymysql
export RSE_DATABASE=postgresql
export RSE_DATABASE=filesystem
export RSE_DATABASE=sqlite

For more permanent settings, you should use the configure client instead.

RSE_DATABASE_STRING

If you have a custom string for a database or file, you can specify it with RSE_DATABASE_STRING. For example, sqlite might look like this:

export RSE_DATABASE_STRING=mydatabase.db

and would create mydatabase.db in your software repository root. For a relational database with username, password, and tables, you would export a full string:

export RSE_DATABASE_STRING=username:password@host/dbname

See database setup for more details.

RSE_LOG_LEVEL

If you want to set the logging level from the environment, set RSE_LOG_LEVEL to one of “WARNING” “DEBUG” “INFO” “CRITICAL” “ERROR” or “FATAL”. For example, to silence most all messages, we might set it to fatal:

export RSE_LOG_LEVEL=FATAL

You can override the environment default by way of using the --log_level flag:

$ rse --log_level INFO get

If you set an environment level that is not one of the choices, it will default to using info. If you provide an inccorect value to --log_level you will be asked to run the command again and choose from the valid choices.

RSE_CUSTOM_DATABASE_DIR

Given that you add a software entry not known to a parser (e.g., from a custom URL) this is the subfolder in the database to organize under. If not set, it defaults to “custom.” For example, this is the default

├── database
│   ├── custom
│   ├── github
│   └── gitlab
└── rse.ini

And after a change:

export RSE_CUSTOM_DATABASE_DIR=research

And then it would be changed to:

├── database
│   ├── github
│   ├── gitlab
│   └── research
└── rse.ini

RSE_API_ENDPOINT

The endpoint to retrieve the taxonomy and criteria from. Defaults to https://rseng.github.io/rseng/api.

export RSE_API_ENDPOINT=https://rseng.github.io/another/api

RSE_ISSUE_ENDPOINT

The repository to post criteria and taxonomy annotations to, via the static interface. Defaults to https://github.com/rseng/software

export RSE_ISSUE_ENDPOINT=https://github.com/rseng/another

RSE Dashboard

RSE_URL_PREFIX

If you are running a server and want to add a prefix to the url, export that:

export RSE_URL_PREFIX=/software

This is especially important if you are running rse export for GitHub pages, as you’ll need the url prefix to coincide with the GitHub pages repository name.

RSE_HOST

In the case that you are exporting content for GitHub pages, you’ll want to export RSE_HOST to be the hostname and port that you need. For example:

export RSE_HOST=https://rseng.github.io

RSE Parsers

Each parser can maintain it’s own namespace of environment variables. These should be specified in the format RSE_<PARSER>_<NAME>

RSE_GITHUB_TOKEN

To interact with GitHub repositories with reasonable API limits, it’s recommended to set this environment variable, a personal access token or a GitHub actions GITHUB_TOKEN.

export RSE_GITHUB_TOKEN=1234...

RSE_ZENODO_TOKEN

You can also provide a zenodo API token to increase limits for the Zenodo parser.

export RSE_ZENODO_TOKEN=1234...