Put data and files on your own server

DavidMalevilleCS
Good day everyone,

I'm currently working on a company and we would like to use Zotero as a technology monitoring tool and for file storage in the same time. Group libraries are of course prefered. All functionalities offered by Zotero match with what we are looking for... Except for security.
We cannot accept to have our informations stored in Zotero servers in USA, because some of them are strictly confidential. My direction won't accept to store our data in a foreign country: we are based in France.
I looked at the webDAV protocol server solution but it looks weird: even if you only store files, does Zotero make datas and metadatas on them? Can I be assured that no data from files stocked in a webDAV protocol server transit in Zotero own data server? Plus, it doesn't work on group libraries...

To completely solve the issue I was looking for a way to have our own server to store all data and files we want to share in our team but it seems really hard to do so.

I was looking at git and some local server ideas (https://github.com/ZotPrime/zotprime
https://github.com/isabekov/dataserver ) but these are old and when I tried to install them on a Virtual Machine it didn't worked well. I'm not a dev expert infortunately.

I'm now asking you, mighty Zotero community: is there a way to share this wonderful tool to my team and store our data AND files in a server we can monitor?

Thanks for your help!
  • JimGrisham
    While the Zotero server software appears to be open source[1], there might be additional bits that need to be integrated to make it work elsewhere.

    For example, it appears their server may be designed to store files on Amazon’s S3 service, so you would need an account in the appropriate region[2] (e.g. ‘Europe (Paris) Region’).

    The back-end software that runs the website-specific ‘translations’ system for ingesting new items / metadata may be separate as well (but you may not need that for your specific application)[3].

    You would also need to check for any hard-coded domain names in both the server ~and~ the clients.

    Finally, there may be components that aren’t open-source or otherwise posted to other GitHub repositories[4].

    … then there’s backups and maintenance, and edge security for your S3 and other France-based cloud services.

    [1] https://github.com/zotero/dataserver
    [2] https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/global-infrastructure/regions_az/
    [3] https://github.com/zotero/translation-server
    [4] https://github.com/orgs/zotero/repositories?type=all
  • adamsmith
    I don't think there's anything more up-to-date than the ZotPrime github, no. Zotero has talked about providing a dockerized version of their server software, but for obvious reasons this isn't going to be a priority for them to spend time on.

    As for the above, answer, that's pretty much right, though:
    - You don't need AWS -- you just need S3 compatible storage, which is available from other providers, too, if you prefer.

    - you don't need 3) at all -- all the standard metadata import runs client-side using the browser add-on and doesn't talk to any server. The translation-server is used for importing to the web library (and ZotBib), which I'd assume you just wouldn't use.

    - The only part of Zotero that isn't open source is the backend service for recognizePDF (i.e. retrieving Metadata for PDFs) because it uses a necessarily private database. You can either decide the disable that option in Zotero or trust their guarantee that it's run in a privacy-preserving way.

  • DavidMalevilleCS
    Thanks a lot for your anwsers. I will send it to my IT team and see how it goes. If we have some success I will give you the tips to make it work!
  • JimGrisham
    Reports of success (or even a summary of why your endeavor ~didn’t~ succeed) would be appreciated.

    P.S. Thanks to Adam for the clarifications!
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