The StudyU modules can be run with Docker allowing StudyU to be very easy to operate. This makes it possible to quickly deploy code changes to your own instance or to store data in a self-hosted Supabase instance data, rather than relying on a public cloud service.

Supabase can be self-hosted by design, since they are open source. We provide a modified version of their docker setup, specifically optimized to work with StudyU.

You will need to install Docker to be able to run the StudyU CLI. Make sure you have Docker installed and configured by running docker -v.

For HPI VMs, this script can be used to install and setup docker.

All the following commands are meant to be run from the root of this repository, unless otherwise specified.

To get started quickly, run the StudyU CLI. It will interactively guide you through the setup process. The CLI is a wrapper around the docker-compose commands described in the following sections. It is located in the root directory of the repository and can be run with ./studyu.

The CLI offers multiple commands to manage your StudyU instance. Run ./studyu --help to see all available commands.

Create a configuration file with ./studyu config and choose the components you want to run. The following components are available:

• supabase: A self-hosted Supabase instance
• studyu-app: A self-hosted instance of the StudyU App
• studyu-designer: A self-hosted instance of the StudyU Designer

Have a look into the use cases below for more details on the different configurations.

There are two components that are added automatically to the list of default components:

• supabase-db: The PostgreSQL database for Supabase
• proxy: Nginx reverse proxy to access the frontend of the components

Start the components with ./studyu start. On the first run, you will need to configure the components. For this just follow the instructions.

After making changes to environment files such as supabase/.env or flutter_common/lib/envs/.env.*, a rebuild of the StudyU components might be necessary. You can run ./studyu delete for this. Be sure to only remove the containers and images and not the volumes.

The StudyU CLI can be added to your PATH to make it easier to run. This can be done by adding the following line to your .bashrc or .zshrc file:

export PATH=$PATH:<path-to-studyu-repo>

Reload your shell with source ~/.bashrc or source ~/.zshrc and you can run the StudyU CLI from anywhere with studyu.

The StudyU CLI setup is designed to be flexible and easily adoptable for various setups. Here we describe the most common use-cases. When running ./studyu config, you can choose which components you want to run, depending on your use-case.

Choose this method if you want to run StudyU together with your own Supabase instance. This might be useful if you want to run StudyU after you made changes to the codebase and the database schema.

Choose the following components:

• supabase
• studyu-app
• studyu-designer

Choose this method if you made changes to the StudyU codebase that are not related to the database schema. In this case the self-hosted StudyU instances will use the default StudyU Supabase instance.

Choose the following components:

• studyu-app
• studyu-designer

StudyU stores its data with Supabase as a backend that in turn stores its data in a PostgreSQL database. The data for this database is stored in a docker volume and is persisted between restarts. All data related to Supabase Storage is stored in a different docker volume.

For backup purposes you should not create a backup of the StudyU data volume, but rather use specific postgres backup tools such as pg_dump.

Run the StudyU CLI with ./studyu backup to backup the StudyU database.

Backing up the Supabase Storage data is not yet supported.

Run the StudyU CLI with ./studyu update to update the repository.