rms-galleries

Quick notes from Mark 1/30/2022

• This is the version used to create the current galleries.

• Everything is still in Python 2, although a conversion to 3 would probably be straightforward.

• The highest-numbered press release checked is PIA25121.

• The code could stand a good bit of cleanup but this currently meets our needs.

GalleryPage

• The superclass of all gallery pages is GalleryPage, defined in gallerypage.py.

  • This class defines a number of properties and methods that ought to be useful across multiple families of gallery pages.
  • These properties include is_planetary, targets, target_types, missions, hosts, keywords, caption_html, etc.
  • There should be a single GalleryPage object associated with each HTML page online in the press_releases/pages subdirectory.

• Subclass PiaPage handles Photojournal gallery pages at https://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/.

  • This class is defined in piapage/__init__.py. Use "import piapage".
  • Various other files in the piapage directory support this class.

• Subclass HubblePage handles planetary web pages at https://hubblesite.org/.

  • This work was not completed.

• The idea is that each subclass of GalleryPage handles the nuts and bolts of getting press release product info from a particular source, and then reorganizes that info a standardized format.

  • Presumably, we would want an additional subclass for APOD (https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/astropix.html).
  • Also, note that the Photojournal has almsot nothing from the New Horizons Arrokoth flyby. That's all at http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/.

• The GalleryPage superclass includes methods to support the scraping of information out of online captions and organizing that info as needed.

  • The dicts subdirectory contains carefully curated dictionaries that define some of the info that is extracted from the captions and extracted values are normalized.

Galleries

• A "gallery" is the name for a index page that points to a bunch of online GalleryPages.
• The file galleries.py defines two useful functions for creating these galleries.
  • by_release_date takes a dictionary of GalleryPage objects, a bunch of additional information, and creates index pages that organize the selected pages by date.
  • by_targettakes a dictionary of GalleryPage objects, a bunch of additional information, and creates index pages that organize the selected pages by target name or target type.

PiaPage

• The PiaPage constructor takes the ID of a Photojournal page as a string (e.g., "PIA12345") or as an integer (e.g., 12345) and creates a PiaPage for that product.
• It maintains a local cache of pages from the Photojournal, so that a request for a given product is only retrieved from the website if there isn't a local copy.
• The local cache is maintained in our shared dropbox inside PDS-Galleries/PIAxxxxx.
  • All local copies are organized by the first two digits, then all five, so the retrieved HTML for product PIA12345 is in PDS-Galleries/PIAxxxxx/PIA12xxx/PIA12345.html.
  • I have found numerous HTML errors in the Photojournal pages, so some of these pages have been edited locally compared to what you would get by going back to the Photojournal and retrieving them anew. It follows that you should not overwrite the locally cached copies blindly.
  • Your local environment variable PIAPATH defines the root location of the cache, meaning the directory that contains a subdirectory called PIAxxxx.
• The file piapage/repairs.py contains a bunch of specialized instructions for how to fix the metadata extracted from individual product pages. Things are automated to the extent possible, but there is so much variation among Photojournal pages that, in the end, I had to build a big dictionary listing keywords to add, keywords to remove, values to replace, etc.
  • This source code is NOT pretty.
  • You will find customized metadata repairs for about 10% of all the pages retrieved.
• We try to separate each caption into two parts--the part with useful information relevant to the product vs. the annoying extra information about who manages what and who build what. That latter information gets repeated way too often and is rarely useful to the reader. This latter information is tagged as "backgound text" and is separated from the caption when displayed online.
  • The file piapage/BACKGROUND_STRING.py contains strings that are used to distinguish background text from caption text. It needs to be actively maintained.
  • Here is an example of background text:

The Cassini-Huygens mission is a cooperative project of NASA, the European Space Agency and the Italian Space Agency. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, manages the mission....

• We try to indicate whether each product is color or black and white using attributes is_color and is_grayscale. This information is hard to obtain from the Photojournal, but a separate procedure works reasonably well.
  • Program piapage/make_COLOR_VS_PIAPAGE.py is a stand-alone program that scrapes the Photojournal site for information about which images are color and which are grayscale.
  • It writes the file piapage/COLOR_VS_PIAPAGE.py, containing its results.
  • The PiaPage constructor checks this cache of information to assign the values of is_color and is_grayscale to each object.
  • At reasonable intervals, as new products are added to the Photojournal, one should re-run make_COLOR_VS_PIAPAGE.py to keep this index up to date.
• We download the thumbnail, small, and medium display products from the Photojournal site and host them locally.
  • This happens automatically when you create a PiaPage object and it determines that the local files are not available.
  • Image files are saved directly into the /Library/WebServer/Documents/press_releases directory tree, although you can modify this behavior by editing the value of class constant DOCUMENTS_FILE_ROOT_ inside gallerypage.py.
• On rare occasions, the thumbnail, small, and medium display products are GIFs instead of JPGs. There's no easy way to know this, so the slightly clunky current approach is to maintain the list of GIF products manually, in piapage/GIF_PIAPAGES.py.
  • You can run the program check_for_missing_or_unneeded_previews.py manually before a deploy to identify any missing image files.
  • random-scripts/getgif.sh might be useful for downloading missing images.
• You can ignore anything in the piapage/training subdirectory. We're not using it now.

Gallery Deployment Procedure

1. Make sure your PIAPATH environment variable points to a local copy of the shared Dropbox directory PDS-Galleries/PIAxxxxx. I strongly recommend that you work on a local copy, and then rsync it back to Dropbox when you are done. This avoids any chance of clobbering the copy on Dropbox.

2. Be sure that the file PDS-Galleries/PIAxxxxx/PIAPAGE_CATALOG.pickle has been copied from Dropbox. If it is not present, this will necessarily be a full update rather than an incremental deploy.

3. If you don't want to write any newly retrieved JPEG files into /Library/Webserver/Documents, edit DOCUMENTS_FILE_ROOT_ inside gallerypage.py. For example, if you are deploying to the "8080" version of the website first, DOCUMENTS_FILE_ROOT_ should point to /Library/Webserver/Documents_8080 instead. (This could be set up using an environment variable.)

4. Right now, we are only tracking Photojournal pages up to 25999. If we have started to see pages above 25900 or so, edit piapage/MAX_PIAPAGE.py to specify a higher limit.

5. cd to the rms-galleries repo directory.

6. In an ipython2 session...

    import piapage
   

7. For an incremental update:

    catalog = piapage.build_catalog()
    piapage.save_catalog(catalog)
   

8. Alternatively, for a full update:

    catalog = piapage.build_catalog(incremental=False)
    piapage.save_catalog(catalog)
   

At this point,

• the local catalog file PDS-Galleries/PIAxxxxx/PIAPAGE_CATALOG.pickle has been updated;
• any Photojournal product pages that were not previously cached locally have been copied into PDS-Galleries/PIAxxxxx;
• for any new Photojournal product pages, the thumbnail, small, and medium JPEGs have been copied into /Library/WebServer/Documents/press_releases;
• the Jekyll files for individual products have been written into the jekyll/press_releases/pages subdirectory of this repo.

9. To generate the new galleries, run this program at the command line (not inside ipython):

    python2 piapage/piapage_galleries.py
   

At this point, the Jekyll galleries have been written to the jekyll/galleries subdirectory of this repo.

10. Before you can process the Jekyll files and push the HTML to the local website, you need to create links inside your local copy of the SETI/rms-website repo:

    GALLERIES=<path to rms-galleries repo>
    cd <path to rms-website repo>
    
    mkdir website_galleries
    ln -s website/_config.production.yml website_galleries/_config.production.yml
    ln -s website/_config.yml website_galleries/_config.yml
    ln -s website/_data       website_galleries/_data
    ln -s website/_includes   website_galleries/_includes
    ln -s website/_layouts    website_galleries/_layouts
    ln -s website/_posts      website_galleries/_posts
    ln -s website/_sass       website_galleries/_sass
    
    ln -s $GALLERIES/jekyll/galleries      website_galleries/galleries
    ln -s $GALLERIES/jekyll/press_releases website_galleries/press_releases
    

11. To deploy to your local copy of the website:

    cd <path to rms-website repo>/deploy
    fab deploy localhost_galleries
    

12. Alternatively, to deploy to the local "8080" version of the website:

    cd <path to rms-website repo>/deploy
    fab deploy localhost_8080_galleries
    

13. Review the local website. Visit:

    https://localhost/galleries.html
    
    https://localhost/galleries/mercury.html
    https://localhost/galleries/venus.html
    https://localhost/galleries/moon.html
    https://localhost/galleries/mars.html
    https://localhost/galleries/jupiter.html
    https://localhost/galleries/saturn.html
    https://localhost/galleries/uranus.html
    https://localhost/galleries/neptune.html
    https://localhost/galleries/pluto.html
    
    https://localhost/galleries/asteroids.html
    https://localhost/galleries/comets.html
    https://localhost/galleries/kbos.html
    https://localhost/galleries/exoplanets.html
    
    https://localhost/galleries/target_mars.html
    https://localhost/galleries/target_jupiter.html
    https://localhost/galleries/target_saturn.html
    https://localhost/galleries/target_uranus.html
    https://localhost/galleries/target_neptune.html
    https://localhost/galleries/target_pluto.html
    https://localhost/galleries/asteroid_1_ceres.html
    https://localhost/galleries/comet_1p_halley.html
    https://localhost/galleries/kbo_pluto.html
    https://localhost/galleries/exoplanet_55_cancri.html
    
    https://localhost/galleries/cassini.html
    https://localhost/galleries/voyager.html
    https://localhost/galleries/juno.html
    https://localhost/galleries/new_horizons.html
    https://localhost/galleries/messenger.html
    https://localhost/galleries/dawn.html
    https://localhost/galleries/rosetta.html
    
    https://localhost/galleries/cassini_jupiter.html
    https://localhost/galleries/cassini_saturn.html
    https://localhost/galleries/voyager_jupiter.html
    https://localhost/galleries/voyager_saturn.html
    https://localhost/galleries/voyager_uranus.html
    https://localhost/galleries/voyager_neptune.html
    

14. If history is any guide, about 10% of the new images will have metadata that needs to be repaired. The simplest way to handle a small number of repairs is to itemize the changes inside the REMOVALS dictionary inside repairs.py. Just create a new dictionary entry keyed by the PIA code of the image. You can list extraneous keyword values to remove, or specify new values to insert for the target, target type, mission, etc.

15. Once you are satisfied with the results, deploy to the public servers. Note that this command only works from a server that has a current, up to date copy of the galleries and press releases.

    cd <path to rms-website repo>/deploy
    fab deploy server1_galleries
    fab deploy server2_galleries
    

16. Copy the new JPEGs to the servers by rsyncing the contents of these directories (although we should really fix this):

    /Library/WebServer/Documents/press_releases/thumbnails
    /Library/WebServer/Documents/press_releases/small
    /Library/WebServer/Documents/press_releases/medium
    

17. Rsync your local copy of the PDS-Galleries/PIAxxxxx directory back to Dropbox.

18. Commit your changes back to the repo on GitHub.