Manager Configuration¶

The Manager is highly configurable using environment variables.

Environment Variable	Default Value	Description
MVI_HOST_NAME	“localhost”	Host name of the machine running the manager.
MVI_PROXY_HTTP_PORT	80	Proxy port for HTTP communication with manager.
MVI_PROXY_HTTPS_PORT	443	Proxy port for HTTP communication with manager.
MVI_PROXY_CONFIG_PATH	“proxy_config”	Path to proxy configuration files.
MVI_AUTH_ENABLED	False	Using the manager required login if true.
MVI_MAX_REQUEST_BODY	1000000000	Maximum allowed transferred filesize. 1GB default.
MVI_LOG_LEVEL	“INFO”	Minimum logger level for manager.
MVI_ACCESS_LOGS_ENABLED	True	Whether to print access logs.
MVI_PROXY_HTTPS	False	Sets up a secure connection to the manager if true
MVI_HTTPS_STAGING_SERVER	False	Sets if a staging server without rate limits should be used
MVI_CONFIG_EMAIL	null	Email address HTTPS and sending notifications.
MVI_CONFIG_EMAIL_PASSWORD	null	Password for config email, only required for notifications.
MVI_NOTIFICATION_SMTP_SERVER	null	SMTP server URL.
MVI_NOTIFICATION_SMTP_PORT	null	Port to SMTP server, usually 587 or 465.
MVI_ACTIVATION_KEY	“”	License activation key. Without key Manager lives for 12h.

Secure Manager Connection¶

It is possible to get a secure HTTPS connection to the manager using automatically created certificates from Let’s Encrypt. To enable HTTPS you must start a new manager with the environment variable MVI_PROXY_HTTPS set to true. We also recommend that you set an email address with the environment variable MVI_CONFIG_EMAIL, so you can get notified if the certificate is about to run out.

Warning

For the Let’s Encrypt certificates to work, the server must have a valid hostname which resolves via DNS to the server’s IP address. It will not work if you access the manager using an IP address or localhost due to how TLS certificates are generated.

Email notifications¶

The first step is to set up an email address that the MVI Manager can use to send the notification emails. For this you need an SMTP server with an email account that you can use. We recommend to have a dedicated email address for sending MVI notifications.

The manager is configured with a notification sender email at startup. We do this by setting four different environment variables at manager startup

Environment Variable	Value
MVI_CONFIG_EMAIL	“email@address.com”
MVI_CONFIG_EMAIL_PASSWORD	“password”
MVI_NOTIFICATION_SMTP_SERVER	“smtp.server.url”
MVI_NOTIFICATION_SMTP_PORT	Usually 587 or 465

Upon startup of the manager, if everything worked, an email will be sent from “email@address.com” to itself, to show that it successfully connected. Otherwise, as long as the manager could still start, any issues with the email configuration will be viewable on the notification tab in the dashboard.

Typical production setup¶

The example below starts a Manager instance that is listening on my.domain.com, enforcing traffic over https with access control enabled and being activated using a provided activation key:

docker run
    --name mvi_manager
    -v /var/run/docker.sock:/var/run/docker.sock
    -v mvi_data:/data
    -p 80:80
    -p 443:443
    -e MVI_HOST_NAME=my.domain.com
    -e MVI_PROXY_HTTPS=True
    -e MVI_AUTH_ENABLED=True
    -e MVI_ACTIVATION_KEY=...
    -e MVI_CONFIG_EMAIL=<some@email.com>
    -e MVI_CONFIG_EMAIL_PASSWORD=<password for some@email.com>
    -e MVI_NOTIFICATION_SMTP_SERVER=<your smtp server address>
    -e MVI_NOTIFICATION_SMTP_PORT=<your smtp server port>
    --restart always
    -d ghcr.io/vikinganalytics/mvi/mvi_manager:{version}

Tip

To ease working with all environment variables, it is possible to make use of the --env-file parameter to docker run. See here for details on syntax etc.