Testing RED-I with a sample REDCap Project

Purpose

The “vagrant” folder was created with the goal of making testing RED-I software as easy as possible. It contains the Vagrantfile which allows you to start a virtual machine capable of running the REDCap software – which means that during virtual machine creation the Apache and MySQL software is installed without any user intervention.

There are a few important things to note before proceeding with running RED-I to import data into a sample REDCap project:

  • You have to install the vagrant and virtual box software
  • You have to obtain the closed-source REDCap software from http://project-redcap.org/
  • You have to obtain a Makefile.ini file in order to be able to execute tasks from the Makefile

Steps

1. Install vagrant and virtual box

On a linux machine run:

  • sudo apt-get install vagrant
  • sudo apt-get install virtualbox

On a mac machine:

For more details about Vagrant software you can go to why-vagrant page.

2. Configure the VM

As mentioned above you have to obtain a copy of the REDCap software from http://project-redcap.org/ and save it as “redcap.zip” file in the “config-example/vagrant-data” folder. This ensures that in the later steps the bootstrap.sh script can extract the files to the virtual machine path “/var/www/redcap”.

Now execute the following commands to complete the configuration:

cd ./vagrant    # must be in the redi/vagrant/ directory
make copy_config_example
make copy_redcap_code
make copy_project_data
make show_config

Please verify that the output from “show_config” matches your expectations.

3. Start the VM

To use the vagrant VM you will need to install Vagrant and Virtual Box.

With these packages installed, follow this procedure to use a VM template:

# must be in the redi/vagrant/ directory
cd ./vagrant
vagrant up

Vagrant will instantiate and provision the new VM. The REDCap web application should be accessible in the browser at

http://localhost:8998/redcap/

If port 8998 is already in use vagrant will choose a different port automatically. Read the log of “vagrant up” and note the port to be used.

4. Verify the VM is running

Verify that the virtual machine is working properly by accessing it using:

vagrant ssh

5. Import Enrollment Data using RED-I

Import the sample subject list into REDCap by executing:

make rc_enrollment

Note: This step is necessary because in order to associate data with subjects the list of subjects needs to exist in the REDCap database.

6. Import Electronic Health Records using RED-I

Import the sample electronic health records into REDCap by executing:

make rc_post

Verify that the output of this command ends with:

You can review the summary report by opening: report.html in your browser

If this step succeded you have verified that RED-I can be used to save time by automating EHR data imports into REDCap.

Congratulations! You can now add your own REDCap project and start using RED-I to move data. Please refer to Add new REDCap Project and API Key document for help.