Snow Owl Docs
7.x
7.x
  • README
  • Getting started
    • Basic Concepts
    • Installation
    • Explore Snow Owl
      • Check Health
      • List available Code Systems
      • SNOMED CT
      • Import RF2 distribution
      • Search SNOMED CT
      • Create a Concept
      • Version SNOMED CT
      • Export SNOMED CT
    • Conclusion
  • Set up Snow Owl
    • Installing Snow Owl
      • Installing Snow Owl with .zip or .tar.gz
      • Installing Snow Owl with RPM
      • Installing Snow Owl with Debian Package
      • Installing Snow Owl with Docker
    • Configuring Snow Owl
      • Setting JVM options
      • Logging configuration
      • Elasticsearch configuration
    • Important Snow Owl configuration
    • Important System configuration
      • Disable swapping
      • File descriptors
      • Virtual memory
      • Number of threads
      • Tweaking for performance
    • Starting Snow Owl
    • Stopping Snow Owl
    • Configuring security
      • Configuring a file realm
      • Configuring an LDAP realm
    • Configuring monitoring
    • Configuration reference
  • Extension Management
    • Extensions and Snow Owl
    • Scenarios
      • Single Edition
      • Single Extension Authoring
      • Multi Extension Authoring
    • Development
    • Releases
    • Upgrading
    • Integrations
  • API
    • Core API
    • SNOMED CT API
      • Branching
      • Compare
      • Commits
      • Concepts
      • Descriptions
      • Relationships
      • Reference Sets
      • Classification
      • Importing RF2
      • Exporting RF2
    • CIS API
    • FHIR API
      • CodeSystem
      • ValueSet
      • ConceptMap
  • Backup and Restore
    • Curator
  • Migrate from 6.x
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  • Config files location
  • Config file format
  • Environment variable substitution
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  1. Set up Snow Owl

Configuring Snow Owl

Last updated 5 years ago

Snow Owl ships with good defaults and requires very little configuration.

Config files location

Snow Owl has three configuration files:

  • snowowl.yml for configuring Snow Owl

  • serviceability.xml for configuring Snow Owl logging

  • elasticsearch.yml for configuring the underlying Elasticsearch instance in case of embedded deployments

These files are located in the config directory, whose default location depends on whether or not the installation is from an archive distribution (tar.gz or zip) or a package distribution (Debian or RPM packages).

For the archive distributions, the config directory location defaults to $SO_PATH_HOME/configuration. The location of the config directory can be changed via the SO_PATH_CONF environment variable as follows:

SO_PATH_CONF=/path/to/my/config ./bin/startup

Alternatively, you can export the SO_PATH_CONF environment variable via the command line or via your shell profile.

For the package distributions, the config directory location defaults to /etc/snowowl. The location of the config directory can also be changed via the SO_PATH_CONF environment variable, but note that setting this in your shell is not sufficient. Instead, this variable is sourced from /etc/default/snowowl (for the Debian package) and /etc/sysconfig/snowowl (for the RPM package). You will need to edit the SO_PATH_CONF=/etc/snowowl entry in one of these files accordingly to change the config directory location.

Config file format

The configuration format is . Here is an example of changing the path of the data directory:

path:
    data: /var/lib/snowowl

Settings can also be flattened as follows:

path.data: /var/lib/snowowl

Environment variable substitution

Environment variables referenced with the ${...} notation within the configuration file will be replaced with the value of the environment variable, for instance:

repository.host: ${HOSTNAME}
repository.port: ${SO_REPOSITORY_PORT}
YAML