This codebase is no longer in use, please see https://github.com/openaq/openaq-api-v2. Version 1 of the OpenAQ API is still available via api.openaq.org/v1 but has been reimplemented in the same repository as version 2.
This is the main API for the OpenAQ project.
Starting with index.js, there is a web-accessible API that provides endpoints to query the air quality measurements. Documentation can be found at https://docs.openaq.org/.
openaq-fetch takes care of fetching new data and inserting into the database. Data format is explained in openaq-data-format.
Install prerequisites:
Clone this repository locally (see these instructions) and activate the required Node.js version with:
nvm install
The last step can be skipped if the local Node.js version matches the one defined at .nvmrc.
Install module dependencies:
npm install
Initialize development database:
npm run init-dev-db
This task will start a PostgreSQL container as daemon, run migrations and seed data. Each of these tasks is available to be run independently, please refer to package.json to learn the options.
After initialization is finished, start the development server:
npm run dev
Access http://localhost:3004.
Stop database container after finishing:
npm run stop-dev-db
Initialize test database:
npm run init-test-db
This task will start a PostgreSQL container as daemon, run migrations and seed data. After initialization is finished, run tests:
npm run test
Stop database container after finishing:
npm run stop-test-db
The server needs to fetch data about locations and cities in the measurement history using AWS Athena. This service must be configured via the following environment variables:
ATHENA_ACCESS_KEY_ID: an AWS Access Key that has permissions to create Athena Queries and store them in S3;ATHENA_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY: the corresponding secret;ATHENA_OUTPUT_BUCKET: S3 location (in the form ofs3://bucket/folder) where the results of the Athena queries should be stored before caching them;ATHENA_FETCHES_TABLE: the name of the table registered in AWS Athena.
Automatic Athena synchronization is disabled by default. It can be enabled by setting the environment variable ATHENA_SYNC_ENABLED to true. The sync interval can be set using ATHENA_SYNC_INTERVAL variable, in miliseconds. The default interval is set in file config/default.json.
If needed, the synchronization can be fired manually. First, the WEBHOOK_KEY variable must be set to allow access webhooks endpoint. Sending a POST request to /v1/webhooks, including the parameters key=<WEBHOOK_KEY> and action=ATHENA_SYNC, will start a sync run. An example with curl:
curl --data "key=123&action=ATHENA_SYNC" https://localhost:3004/v1/webhooks
Other environment variables available:
| Name | Description | Default |
|---|---|---|
| API_URL | Base API URL after deployment | http://:3004 |
| NEW_RELIC_LICENSE_KEY | New Relic API key for system monitoring | not set |
| WEBHOOK_KEY | Secret key to interact with openaq-api | '123' |
| USE_REDIS | Use Redis for caching? | not set (so not used) |
| USE_ATHENA | Use AWS Athena for aggregations? | not set (so not used) |
| REDIS_URL | Redis instance URL | redis://localhost:6379 |
| DO_NOT_UPDATE_CACHE | Ignore updating cache, but still use older cached results. | not set |
| AGGREGATION_REFRESH_PERIOD | How long to wait before refreshing cached aggregations? (in ms) | 45 minutes |
| REQUEST_LIMIT | Max number of items that can be requested at one time. | 10000 |
| UPLOADS_ENCRYPTION_KEY | Key used to encrypt upload token for /upload in database. | 'not_secure' |
| S3_UPLOAD_BUCKET | The bucket to upload external files to for /upload. | not set |
The Athena table is fetches_realtime that represents the fetches from openaq-data and has the following schema:
CREATE EXTERNAL TABLE fetches.fetches_realtime (
date struct<utc:string,local:string>,
parameter string,
location string,
value float,
unit string,
city string,
attribution array<struct<name:string,url:string>>,
averagingPeriod struct<unit:string,value:float>,
coordinates struct<latitude:float,longitude:float>,
country string,
sourceName string,
sourceType string,
mobile string
)
ROW FORMAT SERDE 'org.openx.data.jsonserde.JsonSerDe'
LOCATION 's3://EXAMPLE_BUCKET'Via an undocumented /upload endpoint, there is the ability to generate presigned S3 PUT URLs so that external clients can authenticate using tokens stored in the database and upload data to be ingested by openaq-fetch. There is a small utility file called encrypt.js that you can use like UPLOADS_ENCRYPTION_KEY=foo node index.js your_token_here to generate encrypted tokens to be manually stored in database.
There is a Dockerfile included that will turn the project into a Docker container. The container can be found here and is currently mostly used for deployment purposes for AWS ECS. If someone wanted to make it better for local development, that'd be a great PR!
There are a lot of ways to contribute to this project, more details can be found in the contributing guide.
- openaq-browser site | code - A simple browser to provide a graphical interface to the data.
- openaq code - An isomorphic Javascript wrapper for the API
- py-openaq code - A Python wrapper for the API
- ropenaq code - An R package for the API
For more projects that are using OpenAQ API, checkout the OpenAQ.org Community page.