Version 1.5 RC

[JVital2013]

Version 1.5 RC 2

Upon accepting this pull request, Version 1.5 will be released. Draft changelog:

• The "Other EMWIN" screen is now customizable by the server administrator! Any EMWIN text products can now be displayed on the EMWIN screen. For more on how to configure it, see the configuration documentation.
• Additionally, the Other EMWIN screen now has an Additional Data Loader: The data loader makes it easy for end users to browse all EMWIN text products by their product identifier, originator, and state of origin without changing the server configuration. This feature can be limited by the system administrator.
• Add feature to display K-Index 5+ space weather events as weather warnings. This can be configured by the system administrator.
• Implement custom URLs for each section of Vitality GOES, instead of using one URL for everything like before.
  • This enables you to link to a specific page within your system
  • Also makes the browser forward/back buttons work within Vitality GOES
• Increased optimization to significantly improve performance: On Windows Servers, some pages load 40% faster if you're running PHP 8.2.
  • On my Windows test bed, 24 hours of EMWIN data now takes under 6 seconds to load (was around 10 seconds).
  • Other data (up to several weeks) load in under 1 second.
  • Performance increases on Linux servers are less drastic, but still measurable.
  • Old versions of PHP perform about the same, so update today!
• Implemented fast file parser: In addition to Windows server performance improvements, if your data is not separated into dated sub-folders, you can now turn on a fast file parser to significantly increase web app performance.
  • On a test Linux server with 24 hours of EMWIN data, Current Weather queries went from 300ms to 80ms
  • On a test Windows server with 24 hours of EMWIN data, Current Weather queries went from 6 seconds to 80ms
  • Similarly, a test Windows server with 1.5 years of full disk data (25,557 images) can now be queried in 125ms
  • It is off by default for compatibility, but can be turned on by the system administrator.
• Add ability to parse EMWIN text files when there is more than one message per file
• Add ability to install Vitality GOES into a subfolder of an existing web server (for advanced users)
• Added interpolation to CreateVideos-ABI.sh and fixed bug where it would crash with non-even height photos
• Multiple additional bug fixes and optimizations

Preparing your system for 1.5

This update does not have any completely "breaking changes," but things will work best if your system is configured as follows:

• Apache's mod_rewrite and .htaccess parsing should be enabled for Vitality GOES 1.5+

  • Without this, the browser refresh button may not work correctly.
  • Most Windows servers (including XAMPP) have this enabled by default. No action is needed on your part.
  • On Linux, do the following to make sure mod_rewrite and .htaccess parsing is enabled:
  • Run this command: sudo a2enmod rewrite && sudo systemctl restart apache2
  • Edit /etc/apache2/apache2.conf as root and update this section:

    <Directory /var/www/>
      Options Indexes FollowSymLinks
      AllowOverride None
      Require all granted
    </Directory>

    to this (the important bit is "AllowOverride All"):

    <Directory /var/www/>
      Options -Indexes
      AllowOverride All
      Require all granted
    </Directory>

• If you're displaying EMWIN data:

  • Copy otheremwin.ini from one of the sample configs into your main Vitality GOES config folder
  • Copy the [otheremwin] section from a sample config.ini file into your main config.ini file.
  • Add spaceWeatherAlerts = false (or true) under the [general] section of your config.ini to turn on Space Weather Alerts as Weather Alerts
  • Set fastEmwin to "true" in the [general] section of config.ini to enable fast file parsing for EMWIN text files. Also, set fast to "true" in a category's image section to enable it for a given image
  • Only turn this on if your data is not in subfolders of any kind, like dated subfolders!
  • For more information, see the configuration documentation.
  • None of these changes are required, but necessary to customize the new functionality

• PHP 8.2 or greater is now recommended for performance reasons. This release was validated against PHP 7.4, but future updates will no longer be tested against old PHP versions.

[creinemann]

Nice! Can't wait.