WoodCam RM

WoodCam Records Manager is a Python web application for managing real-time recordings of flotting wood video surveillance cameras installed by EVS lab (UMR5600). It works to manage cameras connected via a VPN over the mobile network to the server on which WoodCam RM runs.

WoodCam RM is able to:

• Retrieve the amount of data consumed during the month from a router equipped with an SNMP agent.
• Retrieve the water heights (or flow rates) of monitored rivers via an external API.
• Check and store the recordings arrived on the server.
• Monitor the camera network with Prometheus and Grafana.

WoodCam RM is built with the Flask Python framework.

Requirements

Quick start

# Clone this repository
git clone https://github.com/EVS-GIS/woodcam-rm.git
cd woodcam-rm

Customizing the .env file

The .env file contains all settings to initialize and run WoodCam RM.

• Set FLASK_ENV=production for production environment.
• Set SECRET_KEY: a secret key that will be used for securely signing the session cookie and can be used for any other security related needs by extensions or your application. It should be a long random bytes or str.
• Set all the database configuration with your own values (WoodCam RM works with a PostgreSQL database).
• Set the API_URL with the API from which you retrieve water heights. Warning: using other API that French Hub'Eau will require some modifications in the woodcamrm/jobs.py file.
• Set the OIDs to retrieve the received and transmitted data volumes on the router.
• Set a default user and password for the app (will be created at flask init-db run).
• Set SCHEDULER_TIMEZONE with your one.

Deploy this app and all dependencies using docker-compose (recommended)

• Copy the example .env file and make the required configuration changes (database, etc...)
• Install docker-compose (https://docs.docker.com/compose/install/)
• If you want to use TLS encryption, place your cacert.pem and privatekey.pem in ./ssl_certs.

# Run containers
docker-compose up -d

# Create database
docker-compose exec app flask db upgrade # At each woodcamrm version upgrade
docker-compose exec app flask seed-db # Only the first time to seed the default user and the tables

# Update prometheus and grafana configuration files
docker-compose exec app flask prometheus-update
docker-compose exec app flask provision-grafana

# Restart services
docker-compose restart

Deploy this app in a virtual environment

# Create python virtualenv
python -m venv env --prompt woodcam-rm
source env/bin/activate

# Install package and dependencies
python -m pip install -e .

# Customize .env file (see details below)
cp .env.example .env
vi .env 

# Initialize database
flask init-db # Only the first time to seed the first data
flask db upgrade # At each woodcamrm version upgrade

# Run application
flask run

Archive the 10min video files on an external server with a simple cron job on this server

First, copy your ssh public key on the woodcam-rm server. Then edit your crontab with crontab -e.

*/10 5-22 * * * rsync <woodcam-rm server>:<path to app repository>/videos/<station common_name>/archives/*.avi <archiving path>/"$(date +'\%Y-\%m-\%d')"/ >> /var/log/woodcamrm-archiving.log 2>&1

Deploy video archives compression on another server

Video compression can be CPU intensive. In order to keep the main Woodcam RM application light, you have the possibility of deporting this task to another server.

• Clone the repository in your compression server.
• Copy the App configuration and the Archive FTP server configuration sections of your WoodcamRM server .env file to the .env file of your compression server.
• Run the following docker-compose command in your compression server.

docker-compose -f docker-compose.aux.yaml up -d

Run development tests (testing database needed)

coverage run -m pytest