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 YAML. 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}

Snow Owl uses SLF4J and Logback for logging.

The logging configuration file (serviceability.xml) can be used to configure Snow Owl logging. The logging configuration file location depends on your installation method, by default it is located in the ${SO_HOME}/configuration folder.

Extensive information on how to customize logging and all the supported appenders can be found on the Logback documentation.

You should rarely need to change Java Virtual Machine (JVM) options. If you do, the most likely change is setting the heap size.

The preferred method of setting JVM options (including system properties and JVM flags) is via the the SO_JAVA_OPTS environment variable. For instance:

export SO_JAVA_OPTS="$SO_JAVA_OPTS -Djava.io.tmpdir=/path/to/temp/dir"
./bin/startup

When using the RPM or Debian packages, SO_JAVA_OPTS can be specified in the system configuration file.

By default, Snow Owl is starting and connecting to an embedded Elasticsearch cluster available on http://localhost:9200. This cluster has only a single node and its discovery method is set to single-node, which means it is not able to connect to other Elasticsearch clusters and will be used exclusively by Snow Owl.

This single node Elasticsearch cluster can easily serve Snow Owl in testing, evaluation and small authoring environments, but it is recommended to customize how Snow Owl connects to an Elasticsearch cluster in larger environments (especially when planning to scale with user demand).

You have two options to configure Elasticsearch used by Snow Owl.

Configure the embedded instance

The first option is to configure the underlying Elasticsearch instance by editing the configuration file elasticsearch.yml, which depending on your installation is available in the configuration directory (you can create the file, if it is not available, Snow Owl will pick it up during the next startup).

Connect to a remote cluster

The second option is to configure Snow Owl to use a remote Elasticsearch cluster without the embedded instance. In order to use this feature you need to set the repository.index.clusterUrl configuration parameter to the remote address of your Elasticsearch cluster. When Snow Owl is configured to connect to a remote Elasticsearch cluster, it won't boot up the embedded instance, which reduces the memory requirements of Snow Owl slightly.

You can connect to self-hosted clusters or hosted solutions provided by AWS and Elastic.co for example.