The Cosmology@Home server is a multi-container Docker application. In a few commands anyone can check out the code from here and have a local version of the server running (identical to the real thing in every way except for user data and a few private files).

The requirements for running the server are:

• docker
• docker-compose
• make

To download, build, and start the server on a fresh environment:

git clone --recursive https://github.com/marius311/cosmohome.git
cd cosmohome
make up

Note: the first time you run this it may take a while as many dependencies are downloaded and images are built from scratch.

At this point, you should be able to connect your browser to localhost to see the server webpage. To connect a BOINC client to the server, you need to reroute www.cosmologyathome.org to localhost (b/c the server code has its URL hardcoded). On Linux, this can be done by adding the line 127.0.0.1 www.cosmologyathome.org to your /etc/hosts file. Then connect BOINC to www.cosmologyathome.org as usual.

For more detailed documentation on how the server works, see the Design Overview.