Multiple users (login + password)

Support
1

Hi everyone,

I am interested in using OpenRefine on a virtual machine with ssh remote access by several users. I would like each of them have their own login and password so that their data would not be accessible to everyone.

Is it possible with OpenRefine? If so, can you please provide me some instructions on how to set it up?

I am planning to use OpenRefine version 3.7.9 on a ubuntu 22.04 machine.

Thank you for your time and help.

Nicolas

2

Hello @nantunes, and welcome to our forum.

OpenRefine is not designed to be used by multiple users concurrently, and you will run through plenty of limitations including

  • user management (login and password).
  • no permission; everyone can see every project.
  • no access right mechanism; if multiple users works on the same project at the same time, they will override each other edits
  • no resource management; if you have one user running compute-heavy operations, it will impact the performance.
3

Okay, thank you for your answer. Indeed I wanted to use OpenRefine to allow multiple user to work together on the same projects, and of course give them the possibility to share directories with data only with the members of their "team" ... Do you know if this feature will be develop in a relatively close future ?

4

@nantunes we do not have a timeline to provide this feature.

5

There are a couple of approaches that work rather well today.

If data-isolation between users is important I would probably go with the container / Jupyter approach. Sharing projects would't be automatic given the isolation needs.

If data isolation is not important, just fireup Openrefine behind VPN and you are good to go, if you go with something like Tailscale you can even hook into user/permission details of your authentication provider.