NPTimelapse

A web tool for recording Neptune's Pride games and generating timelapse videos from them. Designed to run on my Raspberry Pi. To run the server execute start_server.sh

Desciption

This is a Python3 web application made with Flask. It uses SQLAlchemy to communicate with database and Celery to manage its task queue which means compatibility with many DB engines and message brokers adjustable via config.

On the front end it uses UIkit CSS for styling with no JS logic as of version 1.0.

Config

All configuration is located in the config.py file in Flask's instance folder. Check out sample_instance for reference.

App specific config:

• SECRET_KEY Flask will use this value to cipher sessions. Make sure you don't share this with anyone! It's recommended to use an urandom value, for example output of python -c 'import os; print(os.urandom(16))'.

If you're using the provided startup script start_server.sh you may need to edit or comment out the SCRIPT_NAME variable. It sets the url prefix of the whole app on WSGI level so it's not configurable from inside Flask.

All other config is specific to SQLAlchemy or Celery. Check out their respective docs for more info.

Requirements

All python packages required to run this app are listed in requirements.txt and can be easily installed by running python3 -m pip install -r requirements.txt.

The app requires a database and a message broker to function properly. These can be picked from a long list of databases supported by SQLAlchemy and message brokers supported by Celery. Usage of a proxy server like nginx is highly advised.

For fully automated functionality a task scheduler is required, for example cron. Command flask fetch-owners should be called at least once per hour to ensure all data is collected on time and flask purge-videos is recommended at least once a day to clear old cached timelapses.

Command Line Interface

NPTimelapse app defines the following commands using Flask CLI:

• flask init-db [ --reset/--no-reset ] Sets up tables in the database. If --reset is passed the tables are dropped and reset, else existing tables are unmodified.

• flask fetch-owners [ --test/--no-test ] [--close/--no-close] Makes a call to the Neptune's Pride API fetching star owners for all registered games. Updates the database with newly fetched information unless --test is pased. If --close is passed automatically closes all games for which the fetch failed. Useful after server downtime.

• flask purge-videos Clears the video cache freeing the disk space and allowing for new timelapses to be generated.

These commands should either be called from the directory containing wsgi.py or with an environment variable FLASK_APP set up properly.