Try CEDAR Locally in Minutes: Dockerized Distribution Now Available

We’re pleased to highlight the CEDAR Dockerized Distribution—a streamlined and developer-friendly way to deploy the entire CEDAR stack locally. Whether you’re evaluating CEDAR for the first time or preparing for a customized production setup, the Docker-based approach is designed to get you up and running with minimal effort.

What’s Included

The CEDAR Docker distribution includes a comprehensive docker-compose setup that brings together all the core components of the CEDAR ecosystem:

Infrastructure Services
Core technologies such as MongoDB, Elasticsearch, Redis, and other foundational services.
CEDAR Microservices
All key backend services for artifact management, user accounts, authentication, and metadata persistence.
Web Frontends
The CEDAR Workbench, OpenView, and other browser-based tools, fully integrated and ready to use.
cedar-admin Tool
A command-line utility for configuring and managing your CEDAR instance post-deployment.

Why Use the Docker Version?

Fast and Low-Cost Setup

With a single command, the full CEDAR platform can be deployed on a well-equipped developer machine in 20 to 40 minutes, depending on internet speed. It’s ideal for evaluation, demos, or local development environments.

Easy to Customize

If you decide to move toward production use, you can either:

Tune the Docker configuration to match your deployment needs, or
Transition to a native installation using the same component logic.

Minimal Overhead

Avoid the complexity of setting up each component manually. The Docker distribution reduces system configuration errors and speeds up onboarding for developers and integrators.

History & Maturity

The Dockerized version was first released on October 10, 2022, as part of CEDAR 2.5.15, and has since undergone several refinements to improve stability, maintainability, and user experience.

Get Started

To explore the Docker distribution and access full setup instructions, visit:
https://metadatacenter.readthedocs.io/en/latest/install-docker-eval/intro/