WARNING!

THIS PROJECT IS DEAD!

YOU MAY USE IT, BUT IT IS NO LONGER MAINTAINED. IT IS KNOWN TO USE DEPENDENCIES WITH KNOWN VULNERABILITIES.



swflightplanner.se

Hello! You're viewing the source code of the http://swflightplanner.se 
web-application.

This guide covers configuring and starting the application. For installing it,
including all dependencies, see the file docs/install.txt.

NOTE! This app was never made with ease of distribution in mind. Setting
up a working version of the program will take a few hours, and it is 
unfortunately rather likely that I have missed something in these
instructions, and those under docs/install.txt. However, I'll be glad to
answer any questions, so if you do give it a go, and have problems: Just
send me a mail, then continue the next day :-)... Don't bang your head
against the wall :-). I answer questions in Swedish or English, at 
anders.musikka@gmail.com.


Basics

The swflightplanner is built using the Pylons python web framework. It is
mostly written in Python, but some small parts are written in C++ for
performance. The application uses a large amount of external data, which 
is not included in the source code repository. The app needs postgres to
store user data and some information about NOTAMs. Most external data is
not stored in the postgres database however. The map data (normal map data,
as well as elevation map data) is stored in a custom binary on-disk hash-map
format, developed especially for the swflightplanner.


Installing

To install the app you need linux. Other unix-variants probably work, but
I haven't tried. Running the app on windows is probably possible, but will
require some work. 

See the file docs/install.txt for basic information about how to install the app.

Miscellaneous

The application requires some disk space. 
The two maps (airspace map, base map) require about 2 gigabytes each. The
maps consist of prerendered openstreetmap data, in tiles that are 256x256
pixels large, png-compressed, and stored in a custom on-disk hash map.

Elevation maps require a few hundred megs, and are stored in 64x64 tiles.
Elevation tiles are not compressed, but are still (slightly suboptimally)
stored in the same kind of hashmap as the other map tiles. The
hashmap implementation can be found in fplan/lib/blobfile.py.

Environment variables
You need to set PYTHONPATH to point at the root source directory of this app 
(to the directory where this README file is).

You need to set SWFP_DATADIR to point to a directory with the following
layout:

./tiles/plain/ - Normal map
./tiles/airspace - Map which shows airspaces
./tiles/elev - Elevation map
./srtp/ - Nasa Shuttle Radio topography mission data

Map files
The files to put in ./tiles/plain/ and ./tiles/airspace can be generated
from openstreetmap data. To do this, follow the guide in docs/install.txt

Database schema
You need to set up the database with the required tables. The pylons
paster-command can be used to do this:

paster setup-app development.ini


Running
The following environment variables need to be set:
PYTHONPATH - path-to-this-readmefile:shapemerge2d-path
SWFP_DATADIR - path to directory with map tiles, elevation map etc. 
SWFP_ROOT - path to this readmefile

Where shapemerge2d-path is the place where you built the shapemerge2d library
obtained separately.

Then, you need to update airspace data. This is done by running the following:
./updateaip.sh force
The updateaip-script calls a python program, which downloads latest AIP 
airspace data from LFV and Finavia. The force directive forces an immediate
download. If force is not given, the program waits until night-time, then
downloads the data. The program does not exist after downloading data once,
it sleeps till next night, and does it again.

The program also re-renders the bitmapped airspace-map. This takes a very long
time, up to 4-5 hours. Therefore it is a good idea that the script starts
running just after midnight, so that a fresh map is available in the 
morning. Note that you need a pre-rendered basemap for this step to work.


You cannot run the application until airspace data has been downloaded.
The airspace map is not absolutely necessary, one can be faked by adding
a symlink from $SWFP_DATADIR/tiles/airspace -> $SWFP_DATADIR/tiles/plain .
The 'plain' map is the 'base' map, without airspace info. The two terms
'base' and 'plain' are both (slightly confusingly) used - they mean
the same thing.

To start the main web-server process, do:
./start.sh
This runs the server on port 80, using the settings of production.ini.