improve http error messages, trying out pygeoapi with stac browser

[pvgenuchten]

tried to add api endpoint https://dev.api.weather.gc.ca/msc-wis-dcpc/stac
fails with a generic http error,

would be good to see some more details in log why connection failed
seems i had to add it without /stac:
https://dev.api.weather.gc.ca/msc-wis-dcpc
then is added fine

in next step to query the catalog fails also with very generic error

Would be good to have in error message some indication of an expected element in server answer

in this case the browser may not have been able to detect the available stac collections in the service, the payload was:

{
	"collections": [],
	"bbox": [223181.425, 480387.771, 245110.0, 503192.755],
	"time": "2000-01-01T00:00:00Z/2020-09-10T09:34:00Z",
	"limit": 50,
	"page": 1
}

so browser should have indicated it was not able to detect any stac collections in service

[ricardogsilva]

@pvgenuchten

This is perhaps a bit off-topic from the issue description (so apologies in advance), but I just want to comment that I was evaluating the same thing, and it seems pygeoapi is not usable with the stac browser plugin yet.

pygeoapi does not implement the full STAC API specification yet, crucially the /search endpoint, which this plugin uses to discover existing datasets.

Looking at my server logs I see that the stac browser plugin is sending a request to the /search endpoint. And looking at pygeoapi's source code and also at its stac implementation issue, (which is still open) we can verify that pygeoapi does not implement this endpoint yet.