Repository setup

Setting up a Pi Gazing repository

These instructions describe how to set up a central database server for cameras to upload their observations to. We host one such server at https://pigazing.dcford.org.uk, but you may set up one of your own.

This can be a useful thing to do for two reasons:

• If you have a Raspberry Pi controlling your observatory, and you want to use the web interface to browse your observations while the camera is observing, you will find it extremely sluggish due to the CPU load associated with observing. The solution is to export your observations to an external server (for example your desktop PC), and browse them there.

• If you have multiple Pi Gazing cameras, you can browse all your observations in one common place if you set all the cameras to export to a common server.

Software set up

Your server needs to have the Pi Gazing software installed on it, and have the Pi Gazing web interface set up. Instructions for how to do this can be found here.

The web interface needs to be visible across the network to the Raspberry Pi that is going to push observations to the server. You need to pick a virtual host name for the web interface (e.g. my-pigazing-server.local) and configure the file /etc/apache2/sites-available/pigazing-clean.conf to listen to this virtual host. The default configuration file uses the place-holder host name of pigazing-clean.local.

You will probably also need to edit the /etc/hosts file on any machine that will access the server's web interface (including your Pi Gazing observing nodes), to add a line telling them the IP address of your server, e.g.

127.0.0.1 my-pigazing-server.local

You will need to create a user account on the server's web interface for the observing nodes to log into. You can do this using the script src/cmd_line_admin/update_user.py.

Setting up the export

To set up an observing node to export its observations to your server, you need to specify three pieces of information:

• The URL of the web interface running on the server, e.g. `https://my-pigazing-server.local/api/importv2
• The username of the account to use for uploads, e.g. import_user.
• The password for this account.

You should set these three items in the appropriate place in your configuration/installation_settings.conf file. You should then run the script src/cmd_line_admin/default_exports.py.

To initiate the export of observations, the script src/observation_control/export_data.py needs to run. This should happen automatically once a day. It is safe to interrupt this script at any time. Next time it is run, it will pick up wherever it left off.

The script src/cmd_line_reports/list_export_status.py will list how many items are in the queue to be exported. Note that this will read zero until you run export_data.py. The first step the script performs is to search for new observations which have not yet been exported and add them to the queue.