ckanext-nhm

A CKAN extension for the Natural History Museum's Data Portal.

Overview

This extension provides theming and specific functionality for the Natural History Museum's Data Portal.

The codebase shows how to implement various plugins created by the Museum's developers; notably our new ElasticSearch datastore with versioned records.

Installation

Path variables used below:

$INSTALL_FOLDER (i.e. where CKAN is installed), e.g. /usr/lib/ckan/default
$CONFIG_FILE, e.g. /etc/ckan/default/development.ini

Pre-install setup

This package depends on ckanext-dcat==1.3.0, but since that isn't available on PyPI it's not listed in the package dependencies.

Install it with:

pip install git+https://github.com/ckan/ckanext-dcat@v1.3.0#egg=ckanext-dcat

Installing from PyPI

pip install ckanext-nhm

Installing from source

Clone the repository into the src folder:

cd $INSTALL_FOLDER/src
git clone https://github.com/NaturalHistoryMuseum/ckanext-nhm.git

Activate the virtual env:
```
. $INSTALL_FOLDER/bin/activate
```

Install via pip:

pip install $INSTALL_FOLDER/src/ckanext-nhm

Installing in editable mode

Installing from a pyproject.toml in editable mode (i.e. pip install -e) requires setuptools>=64; however, CKAN 2.9 requires setuptools==44.1.0. See our CKAN fork for a version of v2.9 that uses an updated setuptools if this functionality is something you need.

Post-install setup

Add 'nhm' to the list of plugins in your $CONFIG_FILE:
```
ckan.plugins = ... nhm
```
Install lessc globally:
```
npm install -g "less@~4.1"
```

Configuration

Usage

Actions

`record_show`

Retrieve an individual record.

from ckan.plugins import toolkit

data_dict = {
                'resource_id': RESOURCE_ID,
                'record_id': RECORD_ID,
                'version': OPTIONAL_RECORD_VERSION
            }

toolkit.get_action('record_show')(
    context,
    data_dict
)

`object_rdf`

Get record RDF from its occurrence ID.

from ckan.plugins import toolkit

data_dict = {
                'uuid': OCCURRENCE_ID,
                'version': OPTIONAL_RECORD_VERSION
            }

toolkit.get_action('object_rdf')(
    context,
    data_dict
)

Commands

`create-dataset-vocabulary`

Ensures the default dataset vocabulary and categories exists.

ckan -c $CONFIG_FILE nhm create-dataset-vocabulary

`add-dataset-category`

Adds the given category to the dataset category vocabulary.

ckan -c $CONFIG_FILE nhm delete-dataset-category $NAME

`delete-dataset-category`

Deletes the given dataset category from the vocabulary.

ckan -c $CONFIG_FILE nhm create-dataset-vocabulary $NAME

`replace-resource-file`

Replaces the file associated with $RESOURCE_ID with $PATH, e.g. to replace a small dummy file with a large one that was too big to upload initially.

ckan -c $CONFIG_FILE nhm replace-resource-file $RESOURCE_ID $PATH

Testing

There is a Docker compose configuration available in this repository to make it easier to run tests. The ckan image uses the Dockerfile in the docker/ folder.

To run the tests against ckan 2.9.x on Python3:

Build the required images:
```
docker compose build
```
Then run the tests. The root of the repository is mounted into the ckan container as a volume by the Docker compose configuration, so you should only need to rebuild the ckan image if you change the extension's dependencies.
```
docker compose run --rm ckan
```

Metadata

Release files for ckanext-nhm 7.8.1

For a detailed explanation of source distributions (sdists) and built distributions (wheels), please see the package formats documentation.

Source distribution (sdist)

Source distribution for ckanext-nhm 7.8.1
File	Size	Uploaded
ckanext_nhm-7.8.1.tar.gz	55.2 MB	Sep 1, 2026	Details

Built distribution (wheel)

Table of built distributions (wheels) for ckanext-nhm 7.8.1
File	Interpreter	ABI	Platform	Reset
ckanext_nhm-7.8.1-py3-none-any.whl 55.9 MB Sep 1, 2026	Python 3	none	any	Details

Total release size: 111.1 MB

Release files / ckanext_nhm-7.8.1.tar.gz

Download URL	ckanext_nhm-7.8.1.tar.gz
Size	55.2 MB
Tags	Source
SHA-256 checksum How to use checksums	`24a90a4eaffc1f959b9b16e86f06a94e0ec17850a43b140c76a3e032bfbc3a5c`
BLAKE2b-256 checksum How to use checksums	`da6a613a669e80a6464f5409842a1885249bd8823b9de3b2db4e2b56cdc12550`
Upload date	Sep 1, 2026
Uploaded using Trusted Publishing? What is trusted publishing?	No
Uploaded via	`twine/7.0.0 CPython/3.13.14`

Release files / ckanext_nhm-7.8.1-py3-none-any.whl

Download URL	ckanext_nhm-7.8.1-py3-none-any.whl
Size	55.9 MB
Tags	Python 3
SHA-256 checksum How to use checksums	`40c241d2a804a6d6a68cf895cdf3f4e61571d05734e342769c7034df59a7a7b5`
BLAKE2b-256 checksum How to use checksums	`8e54f3da0b2092b166304c1e2019de10d6727a97c1a7fc65fb395e888e44c4b0`
Upload date	Sep 1, 2026
Uploaded using Trusted Publishing? What is trusted publishing?	No
Uploaded via	`twine/7.0.0 CPython/3.13.14`