Retrieval Setup Guide

Full Stack vitrivr

This guide explains how to set up Cineast so that it serves media, thumbnails and the frontend. Alternatively, you can host both vitrivr-ng and media / thumbnails via a webserver.

After following these steps, you should have a running Cineast instance, that also serves vitrivr's UI, vitrivr-ng and the media files.

Prerequisites

• Previously setup the database layer, CottontailDB
• Previously extracted or somehow got data into CottontailDB
• Having the media files corresponding to the data
• All software requirements, such as a JDK >17
• Cloned or downloaded vitrivr-ng
  • Performed npm install and ng build --prod in the VitrivrNG folder
• Optional: Ideally vitrivr-ng and cineast are siblings in the file tree, in order that the path for VitrivrNG is ../vitrivr-ng. This path is used later in this guide.

Setup

As stated in the Prerequisites above, we expect you to have a CottontailDB instance running with appropriate data. Furthermore, for the sake of this guide, there are media files (e.g. videos, images, etc... ) at /media/files/ and the previous extraction by cineast produced thumbnails at /media/thumbnails/.

1. Build Cineast using gradle (./gradlew distZip) and extract the distribution to somewhere sensible (in this guide, it's /vitrivr/cineast/).
2. Copy or create a config along the lines of the default config to the cineast instance (in this guide /vitrivr/cineast).
3. Adjust the database section corresponding to your setup. In this guide, we have CottontailDB running on the same machine, thus it's:

  "database": {
    "host": "localhost",
    "selector": "COTTONTAIL",
    "writer": "COTTONTAIL",
    "port": 1865,
    "plaintext": true
  }

This is pretty much the default value.

4. Navigate down to the api section in the config and adjust ports, thread pool size as needed and then, configure these settings:

• "serveContent": true - This is in order to enable serving the media files, otherwise the thumbnailLocation and objectLocation settings would get ignored
• "serveUI": true - Enable serving the UI from Cineast (i.e. navigating in your browser to <cineast-host>:<cineast-port> will result in having VitrivrNG being served).
• "uiLocation": "../vitrivr-ng/dist" - The location of the UI. This is basically the path to wherever you build VitrivrNG to (using ng build --prod)
• "thumbnailLocation": "/media/thumbnails/" - The location of all the thumbnails previously generated in an extraction step.
• "objectLocation": "/media/files/" - The location of all the media files. IMPORTANT: During extraction, the media object's path is stored relative to the extraction root, during runtime, it is expected that this objectLocation setting resembles this and should therefore be /path/to/extraction/root.

5. Ultimately head over to your VitrivrNG distribution files at ../vitrivr-ng/dist and edit the config.json file there:

• The api.host should be localhost for a local setup, or whatever your Cineast instance is.
• The two resources entries should also point to your Cineast instance

• "host_thumbnails": "http://<cineast-host>:<cineast-port>/thumbnails/:s" - Basically the address of the Cineast host suffixed with /thumbnails/:s. :s will be replaced by the segment id
• "host_objects": "http://<cineast-host>:<cineast-port>/objects/:o" - Basically the address of the Cineast host suffixed with /objects/:o. :o will be replaced by the object id

In our example setup, this results in the api and resource section of the VitrivrNG config being as follows:

"api": {
  "host": "localhost"
},
"resources": {
  "host_thumbnails": "http://localhost:4567/thumbnails/:s",
  "host_objects": "http://localhost:4567/objects/:o"
}

6. Start Cineast with your preferred method.

7. Test your setup by navigating in your browser to <protocol>://<cineast-host>:<cineast-port> (with default settings: http://localhost:4567) and see whether VitrivrNG is served. Perform a test query and confirm both, the thumbnails are properly rendered and also the video preview is working.