Sending Data to a CKAN Data Portal

In this section we will add the components necessary to spin up a new CKAN instance and have our collected data published to it in real time. You should have a Gather server running, have submitted some data to it and have Aether Connect running. If not, go to the previous section

Setting Up CKAN

We’re going to use a script to make it easier to install and configure CKAN. This will download Docker images for CKAN and perform the necessary configuration. It will then prompt you for a password for the admin user. In your terminal, navigate to the aether-bootstrap directory, and then modify the options.txt file:

## CKAN
ENABLE_CKAN=true

Then run the script:

./scripts/init.sh
./scripts/start.sh

Once this has completed, open a new browser window, go to http://localhost:5000 and login with username admin and the password included in .env file: CKAN_SYSADMIN_PASSWORD.

Now go to http://localhost:5000/organization and add a new organization:

Name it eHADemo and click Create Organisation.

Now that we have CKAN running, we need to turn to Aether Connect, the data publishing half of the Aether platform.

Setting Up the CKAN Consumer

In order to communicate with CKAN, the CKAN Consumer needs an API Key. This can be found in the CKAN User page at http://localhost:5000/user/admin:

If it’s not present you can regenerate it in this page http://localhost:5000/user/edit/admin, clicking on Regenerate API Key.

Now you need to set up it in the CKAN Consumer. Using the consumer API usually on http://aether.local/dev/ckan-consumer, register the following artifact.

POST http://aether.local/dev/ckan-consumer/add

  {
    "id": "ckan-id",
    "name": "CKAN Instance",
    "url": "http://ckan:5000",
    "key": "[your-ckan-api-key]"
  }

View the Data in CKAN

Open the datasets screen in CKAN at http://localhost:5000/dataset/. You should see something like this (the name of your dataset will be slightly different):

Click on the dataset. You should now see the main screen for our new dataset. Click again on the dataset name as shown here:

Now click on the Manage button, and in the next page go to the Views tab. Click the New view button and select Data Explorer. Give the view a name and save it.

Now if you go back to the main screen for our dataset, press the Explore button and select Preview, you will see the data you submitted shown in a table:

Congratulations - we are now publishing the collected data to CKAN!

If you now fill in the example-microcensus form again in ODK Collect and submit it to Gather, the data will be automatically published to CKAN.

Recap

In this section we created, configured and started a local CKAN instance. We then configured and deployed the Aether-CKAN consumer that reads messages from the Kafka message queue and posts that data to CKAN. We then viewed in CKAN the data that we collected earlier via ODK.