Hyku vs Hyrax

What is the difference between Hyku and Hyrax? Which should I use?

Where do I start Hyku or Hyrax?

Hyrax is a Rails Engine that you can use to generate an application that you will deploy at your institution. This application is the place for you to customize layouts, styles and behaviors so that it suits your purposes. You will have to make some implementation decisions on your own (e.g. database, authentication, workers). It should be easy to upgrade your application from one Hyrax version to the next.

Hyku is a pre-generated application built using Hyrax. It comes with some choices already made for you (database, authentication, workers) and we recommend you stick with these defaults. Hyku offers some basic customization in the UI (text blocks, banner, colors) and we are working to expand the scope of these customizations. If you fork Hyku and start customizing, you should expect a painful upgrade process; however, active development is happening now to improve upgrading Hyku via the HykuKnapsack project. Hyku comes with scripts for deploying using Docker and the Amazon cloud services. It should also be possible to deploy this locally, although you must set up all the services yourself.

There are service providers in the community who can help by hosting Hyku for you or helping you to set it up locally. See the full service provider list on the Samvera.org website.