hxl-proxy

Python-/flask-based web proxy for transforming a HXL dataset dynamically. Requires Python3.

User documentation is available at https://github.com/HXLStandard/hxl-proxy/wiki

Installation

Installation from PyPi:

pip install hxl-proxy

Installation from source:

python setup.py install

Running unit tests:

python setup.py test

Configuration

To configure the proxy, make a copy of config.py.TEMPLATE (e.g. to config.py), and change its values as necessary. The environment variable HXL_PROXY_CONFIG should point to your local config file's location. More details appear below.

Admin interface

To enable the admin interface, you need to enter the MD5 hash of a password into the ADMIN_PASSWORD_MD5 field in the config file. If your password were "hello-kitty" (don't do that!), you could generate the hash like this using Python3:

$ python -c 'import hashlib; print(hashlib.md5("hello-kitty".encode("utf-8")).hexdigest())'

Caching

Choose and configure your input and output caches as needed, following the examples in the config template. You may need to create local directories or databases, depending on the caching backends you choose.

Database support

Using SQLite3

• DB_TYPE - (required) set to "sqlite3"
• DB_FILE - (required) a file (which the proxy will create if necessary) containing a SQLite3 database of saved configurations. The file's directory must exist and be readable and writable by the web-server process.

The database schema appears in hxl_proxy/schema-sqlite3.sql

Using MySQL

• DB_TYPE - (required) set to "mysql"
• DB_HOST - (optional) address of the MySQL host (defaults to "localhost")
• DB_PORT - (optional) port number of the MySQL host (must be a number; defaults to 3306)
• DB_DATABASE - (optional) database name for the HXL Proxy (defaults to "hxl_proxy")
• DB_USERNAME - (required) database username
• DB_PASSWORD - (required) database password

Note that for MySQL, you must create the database manually. A schema appears in hxl_proxy/schema-mysql.sql

Authorisation tokens

To use the Google Drive selector, you will require a client ID and OAuth id from Google. To allow users to log in via Humanitarian.ID, you will require a client ID, client secret, and redirect URI from the Humanitarian.ID team.

P-codes and mapping

For mapping, the Proxy uses a collection of GeoJSON files hosted online. If you want to use a local copy (e.g. for offline demos), clone the GitHub repository at https://github.com/hxlstandard/p-codes and set the new base URL as the value of PCODE_BASE_URL. Note that the server serving the local copy must implement CORS, since the shapes get loaded on the browser side: https://www.w3.org/TR/cors/

Edit PCODE_COUNTRY_MAP if you'd like to make more countries available in the map dropdown menu.

Usage

Launching a local server (usually on http://127.0.0.1:5000):

python run-server.py

For web deployment, see the hxl-proxy.wsgi.TEMPLATE file and the flask documentation.

For more on HXL, see http://hxlstandard.org

For more documentation about the underlying HXL engine and filters, see https://github.com/HXLStandard/libhxl-python/wiki