README for CCDDroneGUI

Installation

CCDDroneGUI is a python flask webserver that wraps the command-line CCDDrone executables. Obviously they are required. The server also relies on a mongodb database, and the python library interface pymongo. On a RHEL7 system, mongo can be installed via

yum install mongodb-server
systemctl start mongod
systemctl enable mongod

The last two commands will start the server and ensure it comes back up on reboot.

The recommended way to install the necessary python packages is to use a virtual environment. If you have python3 installed, you should be able to simply run scripts/install.sh from this directory.

Configuration

On start, the server requires a config file. There is an example with explanatory comments in config/config.default.py. If you use the default install.sh script, most of these settings will not need to be changed. Some critical options are:

• DATAPATH: path on disk for output fits files. Good idea to make it an absolute path
• CCDDRONEPATH: location of the CCDDrone top-level directory. If left at the default DummyDrone, the server can be tested with scripts that mimic CCDDrone output.
• BASIC_AUTH: If necessary to password-protect the site, set BASIC_AUTH_USERNAME, BASIC_AUTH_PASSWORD, and set BASIC_AUTH_FORCE=True.
• IMAGEDB: these parameters specify the mongodb database parameters. If you have installed mongdb on localhost with default settings, you should not need to change these. OTherwise, if you have authentication required, different ports or hosts, etc., that information can be specified in IMAGEDB_URI. There is generally no reason to change the collection name unless running multiple GUIs.

Running

Simply call ./scripts/start.sh <configfile> If a different port than the default 5001 is required, do: PORT=<port> ./scripts/start.sh <configfile>

If a config file is not specified explicitly, the following files will be tried in order of preference:

• config..py
• config..py
• config.default.py

where is the FQDN (e.g. foo.example.com) and is the first part (e.g. foo).

The server should now be running on the specified port. Check the LOGFILE and EXECUTOR_LOGFILE for issues.