Important notice
Table of content
- Overview
- Hardware requirements
- Getting started with fast setup: use MateCat in a virtual machine
- Advanced Manual Setup
Overview
MateCat is a client-server web application. Most of the interaction runs in the user browser (client), while all calculation along with user data permanently resides on the server side (server).
To run MateCat as a end-user connected to a remote server you only need:
- Google Chrome browser
- A machine with a few GB of RAM
- Internet connection
To run MateCat server on your personal machine (keeping all data on your machine and bearing all the load), you also need administration privileges to install Apache, PHP and MySQL. Running MateCat locally on your machine does not require an Internet connection.
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Hardware requirements
If you just want to test MateCat on a few million words you will need 1 server with:
- Storage: 50GB
- CPU: 2 core x 2.5 Ghz
- RAM: 4GB
To manage 50M words per year of translation capacity, you will need 1 server with:
- Storage: 1TB
- CPU: 6 core x 2.5 Ghz
- RAM: 32GB
If you need to manage up to 200M words per year, you can do it using 4TB of storage, 12 CPU core, and 64GB of RAM and placing the MySQL database on a separate machine (easy to do with the MateCat config file). For handling more than 200M words per year you will need to add a load balancer in front of the web servers and databases. Databases will need a master-master replica schema. This will require an experienced LAMP and scalability engineer. Go to top
Getting started with fast setup: use MateCat in a virtual machine
MateCat ships as a full fledged, self-contained appliance you can get up and running in minutes.
We provide a virtual machine image that comes with MateCat preinstalled. The image is compatible with VirtualBox software (get VirtualBox here, first: https://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Downloads).
Download the virtual machine
You can download the MateCat Virtual Machine image (.ova) from the following URL: matecat_latest.ova (~2.3 GB).
Once the image has been downloaded, and after VirtualBox software has been installed, double click on the image file to start VirtualBox’s import wizard . If you feel unsure about what to input in the various panels, click your way through the wizard by pressing “Next>” button; the default parameters are good enough for an average machine.
Start the virtual machine
Open VirtualBox and start MateCat virtual machine.
After some loading (depending mostly upon the performance of your machine), you should be presented with a desktop environment with a welcome message.
To start MateCat, click on MateCat icon on the left bar, in the upper-left corner of the screen.
We have included some files on the desktop to let you experiment with MateCat.
Important Notice:Altough there is no login request or screen lock, in case the virtual environment prompts you with credentials input, the virtual machine credentials are:
- username: matecat
- password: matecat
That’s all for the fast setup. Enjoy Matecat!
Troubleshooting the image import
In case you experience importing troubles (most of times due to old VirtualBox setups), the original Virtual Disk Image (.vdi) is also available: you may use it to create a working machine in VirtualBox manually (see instructions below):
- Download the Virtual Disk Image (.vdi) from the following URL: matecat_latest.vdi (~7,7 GB).
- Once the download is finished, Open Virtualbox and create a new machine:
- Name: MateCat VM
- Type: Linux
- Version: Ubuntu 64 bit
- Provide at least 2 GB virtual memory
- In the Hard Drive selection dialog, choose to use an existing disk and select the vdi file you just downloaded
- Start the machine
Advanced Manual Setup
Altough you can use MateCat in the virtual machine appliance with only a little performance overhead, high load environments administrators may wish to deploy MateCat on “bare iron”.
To deploy Matecat on your own servers, please refer to Advanced Manual Setup