Customization and automation¶

Administration tab¶

Archivematica’s Administration tab is where users and administrators can create users, change the language of the interface, review storage locations, and set configuration details like DIP upload integrations and PREMIS agent information. For more information about the Administration tab, see Dashboard Administration tab.

Automating microservice decisions using the dashboard¶

It is possible for administrators or end-users to automate almost all of Archivematica’s workflow decision points by changing the default processing configuration through the Administration tab. For more information, please see Processing configuration.

You can also automate workflow choices by placing a processingMCP.xml file into the root directory of your transfer. For more information about the processingMCP file and how to use it, please see Using a custom processing configuration file.

Preservation planning configuration¶

The Preservation Planning tab allows users to edit, add, or disable commands for a variety of preservation tasks, including identification, characterization, normalization, validation, and verification. Please see the Preservation Planning documentation for more information.

Antivirus configuration¶

Archivematica’s antivirus capabilities can be customized by editing various operating system environment variables. Please see Antivirus Administration for more information.

Email notification configuration¶

Archivematica’s MCPClient sends two types of email reports:

• Normalization reports are sent when the normalization process has resulted in at least one error.
• Failure reports are sent when the workflow fails unexpectedly.

The email reports are sent to all users who have an account on the pipeline. Currently, there is no way to configure which users receive the email. If you don’t want a user to receive the email, the easiest way to disable this is to change the email address associated with the user to an invalid one.

If you are running a QA environment, it is possible that your only registered user is demo@example.com. Be aware that Archivematica ignores this address and will not send notifications to it. If you want to test the email reporting functionality make sure to register a functional email address for a user.

Currently, emails are only sent by MCPClient. This means that in order to configure the email backend settings, changes are required in the MCPClient service configuration. For example, you can use the following environment strings to send emails via a local MTA such as Postfix:

ARCHIVEMATICA_MCPCLIENT_EMAIL_BACKEND=django.core.mail.backends.smtp.EmailBackend
ARCHIVEMATICA_MCPCLIENT_EMAIL_HOST=127.0.0.1
ARCHIVEMATICA_MCPCLIENT_EMAIL_PORT=25

For more information about configuring the MCPClient, please see the MCPClient configuration documentation.

Archivematica sends emails using the Django Web Framework. You can install third-party packages like django-ses to support additional email backends. Packages must be installed in the Python environment of MCPClient.

Resources for development configuration¶

If you are working on developing Archivematica, it may be helpful to

A common area for development work is the MCP (Master Control Program). The MCP is the core of Archivematica, and controls the various microservices that Archivematica uses to carry out preservation tasks. Developers who wish to modify the MCP configuration should consult the following resources on the Archivematica wiki:

• MCP
• Basic MCP configuration

For other development resources, please see the Development section of the Archivematica wiki.

Task output capturing configuration¶

When Archivematica’s MCP client (a Gearman worker) runs a client script in order to perform a preservation task, e.g., normalizing a single file, that client script may write data to standard streams, i.e., standard output (stdout) or standard error (stderr). By default, the worker serializes those outputs and sends them back to the MCP server (the task manager), at which point they are stored in the database (the Tasks table). However, in some cases these outputs may be quite large and the job of serializing and moving them around can have a noticeable performance impact. For this reason, Archivematica allows users to configure their MCP clients in order to control whether or not these output streams are captured. See Task output capturing configuration for more details.

Customizing for scalability and performance¶

Archivematica includes a number of features and options to improve scalability & performance. The default configuration options are geared towards “typical” use cases and for many users won’t require any modification. However, some users will benefit from optimizing configuration options to meet their specific preservation needs & available computing resources.

See Scaling Archivematica for a description of three broad approaches to scaling & optimization and the specific techniques available to each approach.

Back to the top