Arne KellerWelcome to the Wiki of the OpenVT Platform!
On these pages, you find general guidelines about how to structure your content, about how the content administration and organisation works and about how certain file types have to be set up in order to be acceptable as public contents.
Getting started
The OpenVT platform uses Gitlab Enterprise Edition 11.6.3-ee. The user documentation can be found in the help section.
In order to get started, just browse the Projects or Groups menu to find all contents that are accessible with your access level. If you would like to contribute to any of these contents, you can ask the Owner of the respective Project to give you access (use the Request Access button next to the Rpoject ID for that -- if there is none, the Project owner has chosen not to allow users to request acces).
As an Internal user, you can also start a new Project -- use the corresponding functionalities in the Explore Projects screen (same holds for groups).
Contributing content to a Project can be done using the upload interface on the Project web site. In most cases, however, it is more convenient to clone the Project to your computer and use Git to synchronise with the repository: see next section.
Working with Git
Git provides a highly efficient open source version control system allowing a synchronisation of a repository with several remote copies (clones), which can be modified simultaneously by different users. Git is the core component of Gitlab and thus of the OpenVT platform.
A very short first step manual how to install Git and to get started is here on the wiki. For any further information please refer to the Git and Gitlab documentation.
Where can I find which content on OpenVT?
On the OpenVT platform, basically three main Public contents can be found (each in a dedicated group, some of them still to be defined):
- Human Body Models (HBMs) produced by VIRTUAL: these are in the VIVA group
- Other tools developed by VIRTUAL: These are in the VIRTUAL tools group
- VIRTUAL test protocols
- Experimental data/numerical results
How can I contribute to VIRTUAL models/tools and other content?
Generally, as an Open Source project, VIRTUAL allows and even encourages external users to contribute to the content. However, there are contents which are more and less suitable to that. Therefore, for each content, the content owner is in charge of allowing or not user to request access (i.e., to be able to contribute): If that is the case, a "request access" button is visible on the repository site. Click that button and let the content owner know why and how you would like to contribute to the content.
Which contents should I upload to the OpenVT platform?
As a VIRTUAL project member, you can upload your own content to OpenVT: Please, find guidelines for that here.
Further information: Please, check out the following pages if you would like to:
- Learn about how the content administration works: administration guidelines
- Learn about how to get your project Public: Public repositories
- Learn about general rules for content and file structure: general file guidelines
- Learn about certain file types: See the pages in the file-types section.
- Learn about the Gitlab server and where to find documentation: OpenVT Gitlab
SSH vs. SSL, problems with git pull/push:
By default, SSH is the recommended method for secure git actions on OpenVT (see getting started section for how to operate SSH in Linux and Windows).
If you would like to use SSL via https instead, you might encounter problems with an SSL certificate error. Please, see here for a workaround to temporarily fix this problem:
SSL certificate workaround
Pulling one project into another: Submodules
Git offers the possibility to use the content of one repository from another one using Submodules. Learn how to set up a submodule here.