8. Web public view

Tip

Web public views are meant for open data distribution. In this page you will learn:

how to distribute public data through a web view
about risks when publishing data

Spider allows for public data sharing in a fast and easy way, which is often a huge problem in other platforms. In a web-based front-end, the so called web public view, you can give direct access to external collaborators in selected directories containing designated data products.

But how does this work?

Let’s say that you have run some analysis on Spider and you want to redistribute some scientific products or intermediate results to collaborators that are not members of your Spider project, thus they don’t have access to your project space. Here is what you need to do:

Login to Spider, select the files that you want to publish and copy them to your project space /project/[PROJECTNAME]/Public directory, e.g.:

#the user [USERNAME: surfadvisors-homer] belongs to the project [PROJECTNAME: surfadvisors] and wants to publish the file 'hello-world.sh'
ssh surfadvisors-homer@spider.surfsara.nl
cp $HOME/hello-world.sh /project/surfadvisors/Public/
ls -l /project/surfadvisors/Public/hello-world.sh
#-rwxrwxrwx  1  surfadvisors-homer  surfadvisors-homer  192 Jul  1 08:53 hello-world.sh

That’s it! Any data located in your /project/[PROJECTNAME]/Public directory is exposed to the web under the domain: https://public.spider.surfsara.nl/project/[PROJECTNAME]/. This means that the example file can be downloaded by anyone from link below:

https://public.spider.surfsara.nl/project/surfadvisors/hello-world.sh

Warning

Be careful with the data you place under your project space /project/[PROJECTNAME]/Public directory. This data is automatically exposed to the web and can be downloaded by anyone, even if they don’t know the URL explicitly: the URL can be found through webcrawling!