Production Checklist

When moving your VuFind® instance into production, there are quite a few details you should consider. This page helps to gather them into a single list.

One of the most important considerations when going to production is security. See the Security page for some helpful suggestions.

Most of VuFind®'s default user interface is designed to be as generic as possible. However, there are some areas that are intended to be customized with locally-relevant content (or disabled). Some templates you should consider overriding in your local custom theme:

• header.phtml is a good place to add your institution's name and logo.
• footer.phtml includes a “Need Help?” section with some links to information (“Ask a Librarian”, “FAQs”) that you will want to customize or disable.

VuFind®'s default configurations are designed to offer a reasonable starting point for most users, but there are a few settings that you will almost certainly want to change, and there are a number of optional features which are disabled by default but worth considering.

• By default, VuFind® has the “Sample” ILS driver enabled, which returns fake and useless status information. The web-based installer will encourage you to change this. You should also review the [Catalog] section of config.ini to ensure that ILS features (like renewals, request cancellation, etc.) are set to your preferences.
• By default, VuFind® uses “Database” authentication, in which users can sign up and manage accounts in VuFind® itself. In most production environments, you will likely want to integrate the system with an external authentication system. See the authentication page for details.
• By default, VuFind® has some social features (comments, tags, etc.) enabled and others (ratings) disabled; you should review the [Social] section of config.ini and ensure appropriate configuration of these settings.
• By default, VuFind® shows the “topic” facet above the search results, instead of along the side with the rest of the facets. If you dislike this split approach, you can move the topic_facet setting from [ResultsTop] to [Results] in facets.ini.

Supported out of box starting with VuFind® 9.0

Legislation such as GDPR in Europe may require that the user is asked for consent to store cookies and be informed about mandatory ones. You can set up VuFind® to request cookie consent from the user. Also ensure that any added content from third parties is included in the cookie information and not displayed without consent.

• For very large indexes, deep navigation into the Solr index can cause performance problems. You can set the result_limit setting in searches.ini to limit pagination.

See the Automation page for some suggestions on automating common tasks to keep your instance up to date and performant.

In particular, don't forget to set up cron jobs to expire old searches and other obsolete data in your database, to avoid uncontrolled table growth. See the expire* jobs of the util category on the Command Line Utilities page for more information.