This is the web interface used to access photon ranch observatories.

You can interact with the site at www.photonranch.org, or start up your own local server.

Photon Ranch is a global network of telescopes, created for middle and high school students to learn observational astronomy. This web application is the portal where users can control telescopes in real time, schedule long-running observation projects, organize the data they've acquired, and interpret the data using a variety of data analysis tools.

You will need npm or a similar package manager to run this vue project.

To run the project, first clone the repository and install the dependencies:

git clone https://github.com/LCOGT/ptr_ui.git
cd ptr_ui
npm install

Run a local instance with:

npm run serve

Photon Ranch currently has two stages running online:

• the 'production' environment uses the main branch, and lives at https://www.photonranch.org
• the 'dev' environment uses the dev branch, and lives at https://dev.photonranch.org

Pull requests should propose changes for the dev branch, not main. This is because, for various reasons, the 'dev' environment is more active, up to date, and used by more people than the 'production' environment, which sits somewhat dormant for the time being.

Pull requests must be approved by at least one reviewer and pass a code linter status check before changes can be merged.

The linter involves two passes:

• a lint over the entire codebase using .eslintrc.js
• a lint over all changed files using .eslintrc_strict.js. This is for enforcing a higher standard of quality that we can't apply to the entire codebase in one pass. It also allows for more gradual adoption of any future changes to the linter configuration.

You can verify that the code passes either of these checks locally before commiting your changes in a pull request.

• To run the basic linter over everything, run npm run lint:check, and apply any automatically-fixable changes with npm run lint:fix.
• To run the strict linter over changes from the dev branch, run npm run lint-changes:check, with the similar npm run lint-changes:fix to apply any changes that are auto-fixable.

It's also possible to lint specific directories or files manually using eslint, for example: eslint -c .eslintrc_strict.js src/components/SiteNavbar.vue --fix would check lint src/components/SiteNavbar.vue using the strict linter configuration, automatically fix any changes it can, displaying remaining errors that need to be manually corrected.

Api endpoint urls used by the frontend are configured in the vuex module in src/store/modules/api_endpoints.js. This provides a mechanism for dynamically toggling between different urls.

The backend services defined here and used for the main deployment (and set by default) are:

• General site communication: https://api.photonranch.org
• Sending commands: https://jobs.photonranch.org
• Calendar: https://calendar.photonranch.org
• Creating and managing projects: https://projects.photonranch.org
• Site and instrument status: https://status.photonranch.org
• Live site operation log stream: https://logs.photonranch.org
• Image analysis: https://quickanalysis.photonranch.org

User authentication and authorization is handled by Auth0. The configuration for this is specified in the file auth_config.json.