Archivematica 1.5 is a legacy release, and these documents are no longer being maintained.

Archivematica Quick-Start Guide

Archivematica is a free and open-source digital preservation system that is designed to maintain standards-based, long-term access to collections of digital objects. Archivematica is packaged with the web-based content management system AtoM for access to your digital objects.

This guide will get you up and running with Archivematica for testing purposes. This is not a guide to install Archivematica for development or production - please see Installation for full installation instructions.

The instructions below are applicable to both the sandbox and an Archivematica virtual machine, unless otherwise noted. Which one you decide to use is up to you.

On this page:

Using the sandbox

Artefactual maintains an Archivematica sandbox with the following credentials:

The sandbox is provided as an easy way to test the latest release of the Archivematica. Please note that the website will automatically reset daily. Any packages that you create will not be permanently saved. Additionally, there may be more than one demo user logged-in at the same time, so you may see changes made by others while you are using the software.

The demo site is publicly edited and unmoderated. For reasons of security, test transfers are limited to Artefactual’s provided sample data. Users who wish to test using their own data may download the Vagrant box (described below) and test locally.

Note

If you are using the sandbox, you can skip the next section.

Installing on a virtual machine

It is possible to deploy Archivematica on a virtual machine. Users may want to do this in order to test Archivematica’s functionality using their own data. The recommended way to install Archivematica on a virtual machine is with Ansible and Vagrant.

To install and run Archivematica on a virtual machine, you must be somewhat comfortable working on the command line. Note that the commands below are for Ubuntu; if you are installing on Mac or a different Linux distribution, the commands might be slightly different.

Install VirtualBox, Vagrant, and Ansible with the following commands:

sudo apt-get install virtualbox vagrant

sudo pip install -U ansible

Vagrant must be at least version 1.5. Check your version with:

vagrant --version

If it is not up to date, you can download the newest version from the Vagrant website .

The deployment repository is the source code from which you will be building your local Archivematica instance. Check out the deployment repository:

git clone https://github.com/artefactual/deploy-pub.git

Ansible roles govern the deployment - they tell Archivematica how it should be built. Download the Ansible roles:

cd deploy-pub/playbooks/archivematica

ansible-galaxy install -f -p roles/ -r requirements.yml

Now that you have the source code and the rules for building Archivematica, it’s time to start building. This step will create your virtual machine and build, or provision, Archivematica:

vagrant up

Warning

This will take a while. It depends on your computer, but it could take up to an hour. Your computer may be very slow while Archivematica is being provisioned - be sure to save any work and be prepared to step away from your computer while Archivematica is building.

Once it’s done provisioning, you can log in to your virtual machine:

vagrant ssh

You may also now access your Archivematica instance through the web browser:

Starting your first transfer

To start your first transfer, go to the Archivematica dashboard - the main page of either the sandbox or your Archivematica VM

Ingest and normalization

AIP and DIP storage

Uploading a DIP

Processing Configurations

The Format Policy Registry

Archivematica 1.5

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Archivematica documentation by Artefactual Systems Inc. is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

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