About

AIPscan was developed to provide a more in-depth reporting solution for Archivematica users. It crawls METS files from AIPs in the Archivematica Storage Service to generate tabular and visual reports about repository holdings. It is designed to run as a stand-alone add-on to Archivematica. It only needs a valid Storage Service API key to fetch source data.

License

Apache License Version 2.0
Copyright Artefactual Systems Inc (2021)

Contents

• Screenshots
• Installation
• Usage

Screenshots

AIPScan fetch job

Finding an AIP

Viewing an AIP

Selecting a report

Example: pie chart "format types" report

Example: tabular "largest files" report

Installation

AIPscan is a web-based application that is built using the Python Flask micro-framework. Below are the developer quickstart instructions. See INSTALL for production deployment instructions. See CONTRIBUTING for guidelines on how to contribute to the project, including how to create a new AIPscan report.

AIPScan Flask server

• Clone files and cd to directory: git clone https://github.com/artefactual-labs/AIPscan && cd AIPscan
• Set up virtualenv in the project root directory: virtualenv -p python3 venv
• Activate virtualenv: source venv/bin/activate
• Install requirements (this includes Flask & Celery): pip install -r requirements/base.txt
• Bundle static assets: make build
• Enable DEBUG mode if desired for development: export FLASK_CONFIG=dev
• In a terminal window, start the Flask server: python run.py
• Confirm that the Flask server and AIPscan application are up and running at localhost:5000 in your browser.. You should see a blank AIPscan page like this:

Background workers

Crawling and parsing many Archivematica AIP METS xml files at a time is resource intensive. Therefore, AIPscan uses the RabbitMQ message broker and the Celery task manager to coordinate this activity as background worker tasks. Both RabbitMQ and Celery must be running properly before attempting a METS fetch job.

RabbitMQ

You can downnload and install RabbitMQ server directly on your local or cloud machine or you can run it in either location from a Docker container.

Docker installation

docker run --rm \
  -it \
  --hostname my-rabbit \
  -p 15672:15672 \
  -p 5672:5672 rabbitmq:3-management

Download and install

• Download RabbitMQ installer.

• In another terminal window, start RabbitMQ queue manager:

  export PATH=$PATH:/usr/local/sbin
  sudo rabbitmq-server

RabbitMQ dashboard

• The RabbitMQ dashboard is available at http://localhost:15672/
• username: guest / password: guest
• AIPScan connects to the RabbitMQ queue on port :5672.

Celery

Celery is installed as a Python module dependency during the initial AIPscan requirements import command: pip install -r requirements.txt

To start up Celery workers that are ready to receive tasks from RabbitMQ:

• Open a new terminal tab or window.
• Navigate to the AIPscan root project directory.
• Activate the Python virtualenv in the AIPscan project directory so that the Celery dependency gets automatically loaded: source venv/bin/activate
• Enter the following command: celery -A AIPscan.worker.celery worker --loglevel=info
• You should see terminal output similar to this to indicate that the Celery task queue is ready:

Development

Requires Docker CE and Docker Compose.

Clone the repository and go to its directory:

git clone https://github.com/artefactual-labs/AIPscan
cd AIPscan

Build images, initialize services, etc.:

docker-compose up -d

Optional: attach AIPscan to the Docker Archivematica container network directly:

docker-compose -f docker-compose.yml -f docker-compose.am-network.yml up -d

In this case, the AIPscan Storage Service record's URL field can be set with the Storage Service container name:

http://archivematica-storage-service:8000

Access the logs:

docker-compose logs -f aipscan rabbitmq celery-worker

Shut down the AIPscan Docker containers:

docker-compose down

Shut down the AIPscan Docker containers and remove the rabbitmq volumes:

docker-composer down --volumes

Production deployments

For production deployments, it's recommended to use MySQL instead of sqlite. This can be achieved by exporting an environment variable named SQLALCHEMY_DATABASE_URI for celery and AIPscan services, that points to mysql using format mysql+pymysql://user:pass@host/db.

Sqlite databases can be migrated using sqlite3mysql:

/usr/share/archivematica/virtualenvs/AIPscan/bin/pip install sqlite3-to-mysql
/usr/share/archivematica/virtualenvs/AIPscan/bin/sqlite3mysql -f aipscan.db -d <mysql database name> -u<mysql database user> ----mysql-password <mysql database password>

Tools

The tools directory contains scripts that can be run by developers and system adminsitrators.

Test data generator

The test data generator, tools/generate-test-data, tool populates AIPscan's databse with randomly generated example data.

Fetch script

The AIP fetch tool, tools/fetch_aips, allows all, or a subset, of a storage service's packages to be fetched by AIPscan. Any AIPs not yet fetched by AIPscan will be added but no duplicates will be added if an AIP has already been fetched. Any AIPs that have been newly marked as deleted will be removed from AIPscan.

When using the script the storage service's list of packages can optionally be grouped into "pages" with each "page" containing a number of packages (specified by a command-line argument). So, for example, packages on a storage service with 150 packages on it could be fetched by fetching three pages of 50 packages. Likewise if the storage service has anything from 101 to 149 packages on it it could also be fetched by fetching three pages of 50 packages.

If using cron, or some other scheduler, to automatically fetch AIPs using this tool consider using the --lockfile option to prevent overlapping executions of the tool.

Cached package list

A storage service's list of packages is downloaded by the script and is cached so paging, if used, will remain consistent between script runs. The cache of a particular cached list of packages is identified by a "session descriptor". A session descriptor is specified by whoever runs the script and can be any alphanumeric identifier without spaces or special characters. It's used to name the directory in which fetch-related files are created.

Below is what the directory structure would end up looking like if the session identifier "somedescriptor" was used, showing where the packages.json file, containing the list of a storage service's packages, would be put.

AIPscan/Aggregator/downloads/somedescriptor
├── mets
│   └── batch
└── packages
    └── packages.json

NOTE: Each run of the script will generate a new fetch job database entry. These individual fetch jobs shouldn't be deleted, via the AIPscan web UI, until all fetch jobs (for each "page") have run. Otherwise the cached list of packages will be deleted and the package list will have to be downloaded again.

Running tools

These should be run using the same system user and virtual environment that AIPscan is running under.

Here's how you would run the generate-test-data tool, for example:

cd <path to AIPscan base directory>
sudo -u <AIPscan system user> /bin/bash
source <path to AIPscan virtual environment>/bin/activate
./tools/generate-test-data

In order to display a tool's CLI arguments and options, enter <path to tool> --help.

Database documentation generator

To generate database documentation, using Schemaspy run via Docker, enter the following:

sudo make schema-docs

Database documentation will be output to the output directory and viewable by a web browser by opening index.html.

Usage

• Ensure that the Flask Server, RabbitMQ server, and Celery worker queue are up and running.
• Go to localhost:5000 in your browser.
• Select "New Storage Service"
• Add an Archivematica Storage Service record, including API Key, eg. https://amdemo.artefactual.com:8000
• Select "New Fetch Job"
• Check the black and green terminal to confirm that AIPscan successfully connected to the Archivematica Storage Service, that it received the lists of available packages from Archivematica, and that it has begun downloading and parsing the AIP METS files.
• This could take a while (i.e. a few hours) depending on the total number of AIPs in your Storage Service and the size of your METS xml files. Therefore, if you have the option, it is recommended that you test AIPscan on a smaller subset of your full AIP holdings first. This should help you estimate the total time to run AIPscan against all packages in your Storage Service.
• When the Fetch Job completes, select "View AIPs" button, "AIPs" menu, or "Reports" menu to view all the interesting information about your Archivematica content in a variety of layouts.