Study Tracker

Study Tracker makes the job of managing your team's research easier by providing a user-friendly web application that serves as a single source-of-truth for your organization. Save time by connecting with other required platforms, such as electronic laboratory notebooks (ELNs), data file storage systems, and team messaging services. Integrate Study Tracker with other platforms via an integrated REST API and event dispatcher service for sharing of data.

Looking for a fully-managed Study Tracker? Take a look at Lab Atlas.

Requirements

• JDK 17+
• Maven 3+
• PostgreSQL 12+
• OpenSearch 2+ (optional)

NodeJS and NPM are not required for building and running the project, as the frontend-maven-plugin installs them at build time, in order to properly compile the front-end of the application.

Upgrading from Study Tracker v0.9 or earlier

Starting in v1.0, Study Tracker now requires Java 17 and now supports OpenSearch in place of ElasticSearch. Some older initialization scripts have also been removed, so if you are coming from earlier than v0.9.0, you will first want to upgrade to v0.9.11 and then to v1.0+.

Documentation

For instructions about how to configure deploy Study Tracker, see Gitbook.

Supported Integrations

Electronic Laboratory Notebook

• Benchling

File storage

• Microsoft SharePoint & OneDrive
• Egnyte
• Amazon S3
• Local filesystem

Event Management

• AWS EventBridge

Single Sign-on

• Okta
• Microsoft Entra ID (Azure AD)

Source Code Management

• GitLab

Quick Start

For a rapid build and deployment in development mode, follow the steps below. For production deployment, see the wiki.

1. Make sure you have all requirements installed.

2. Create a new PostgreSQL database.

3. Create a new file, web/src/main/resources/application.properties. Use the application.properties.example file as a template for filling out the required parameters for running the application.

4. Create a new file, web/flyway.conf, using the flyway.conf.example file as a template. Fill in your database's username, password, and connection URL.

5. Build the application with the included Maven wrapper:

   ./mvnw clean package -DskipTests

6. Run the Flyway plugin to import the Study Tracker database schema and default data:

   ./mvnw -Dflyway.configFiles=web/flyway.conf flyway:clean flyway:migrate

7. You can run the application with Maven from the web directory:

   ./mvnw spring-boot:run 

   Or, you can execute the packaged WAR file directly:

   java -jar web/target/study-tracker.war

Docker Support

An official Study Tracker Docker image is available from the GitHub Container Registry. You can build the image locally from source by running the following command from the root of the project:

docker buildx build --platform linux/amd64 -t study-tracker .

An example docker-compose.yml file is available in the root of the project, which you can use for quickly spinning up a local instance of Study Tracker with PostgreSQL.

1. Create a folder name.docker.

2. Create two folders inside .docker named config and data.

3. Create a file named application.properties inside the .docker/config folder, and copy the following contents into it:

   server.port=8080
   application.host-name=localhost
   application.secret=studytrackerstudytracker
   admin.email=your-email@domain.com
   admin.password=password
   storage.temp-dir=/tmp
   storage.local-dir=/data

4. Run the following command from the root of the project to start the application:

   docker compose -f docker-compose.yml up

5. You can now access Study Tracker at http://localhost:8080 and log in with the email and password defined in the application.properties file.

Contact

For questions about Study Tracker, or if you would like to contribute, please contact:

• Will Oemler, Dotwise Software

For support or feature requests:

• support@dotwisesoftware.com

License

Copyright 2019-2025 the original authors

Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (the "License"); you may not use this file except in compliance with the License. You may obtain a copy of the License at

   http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0

Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, software distributed under the License is distributed on an "AS IS" BASIS, WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or implied. See the License for the specific language governing permissions and limitations under the License.

Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (the "License"); you may not use this file except in compliance with the License. You may obtain a copy of the License at

http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0

Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, software distributed under the License is distributed on an "AS IS" BASIS, WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or implied. See the License for the specific language governing permissions and limitations under the License.