Jamā (जमा)
Jamā is a Django-based media repository application developed at CERTIC, Université de Caen Normandie. It provides APIs and user interfaces for storing, organizing, enriching, and serving collections of media resources.
It is packaged as jama-CERTIC and installs a jama command, which behaves
like a standard Django management command entry point.
Features
- Projects, collections, resources, files, metadata, and access control.
- JSON-RPC API and web UI.
- Chunked file uploads and hash-based source-file storage.
- Background media processing with Django Tasks and
django-tasks-db. - IIIF tiled image generation for image and document resources.
- HLS generation for videos.
- OCR and ExifTool metadata extraction.
- Optional ARK identifier integration.
- Project snapshot export and restore commands.
- Optional PostgreSQL/PostGIS deployment; SQLite is available for small or test instances.
Requirements
Jamā requires Python 3.13 and Django 6.
Some features depend on external command-line tools that must be installed on the host system:
- ImageMagick (
convert) for image conversion. - Poppler (
pdftoppm,pdftotext) for PDF processing. - libvips (
vips) for IIIF tiled image generation. - Tesseract for OCR.
- ExifTool for technical metadata extraction.
- FFmpeg/FFprobe for video processing and HLS generation.
For production deployments, use a real web server, a separate task worker, and PostgreSQL when the instance will handle significant traffic or concurrent use.
Installation
pip install jama-CERTIC
Initialize the database and create an administrator account:
jama migrate
jama createsuperuser
Start a development server:
jama runserver
By default, Jamā stores persistent data under $HOME/.jama/.
Background Tasks
Jamā uses Django Tasks with the database backend provided by
django-tasks-db. Start at least one worker to process media jobs such as IIIF
tiling, OCR, HLS generation, ExifTool extraction, ARK assignment, and bulk
metadata updates:
jama db_worker
Recurring tasks are registered and run through django-crontask:
jama crontask --no-heartbeat
In production, run the web process, one or more db_worker processes, and the
cron process separately, for example with systemd.
Configuration
At startup, Jamā reads environment variables and also loads an env file from
JAMA_VAR_DIR. If the file does not exist, Jamā creates it automatically with
documented defaults and a random JAMA_SECRET. Existing configurations must
provide a non-empty JAMA_SECRET or startup will fail.
Important variables include:
JAMA_VAR_DIR="$HOME/.jama"
JAMA_SECRET="change-me"
JAMA_SITE="http://localhost:8000/"
JAMA_STATIC_ROOT="$HOME/.jama/static"
JAMA_DB_ADAPTER="sqlite" # use another value for PostgreSQL
JAMA_SQLITE_DB_PATH="$HOME/.jama/db.sqlite3"
JAMA_DB_HOST="localhost"
JAMA_DB_PORT="5432"
JAMA_DB_NAME="django"
JAMA_DB_USER="django"
JAMA_DB_PASSWORD="django"
JAMA_FILES_DIR="$HOME/.jama/media_source_files"
JAMA_IIIF_DIR="$HOME/.jama/iiif"
JAMA_IIIF_PROCESSING_DIR="$HOME/.jama/processing"
JAMA_IIIF_ENDPOINT="http://localhost/iip/IIIF="
JAMA_HLS_DIR="$HOME/.jama/hls"
JAMA_HLS_ENDPOINT="http://localhost:8000/hls/"
See configuration.md in the source repository for the complete list of
supported settings.
Useful Commands
jama --help
jama collectstatic
jama listprojects
jama newjamaproject "Project title"
jama addlocalfiles /path/to/files username PROJECT_ID --extensions .jpg .tif
jama ensureiiif
jama snapshotproject PROJECT_ID /path/to/snapshot --include-files
jama restoreproject /path/to/snapshot "Restored project"
The jama repl command starts a Django-aware interactive shell with commonly
used Jamā models and helpers imported.
Project Snapshots
Jamā can export a project as a restorable snapshot. A snapshot is a directory
containing NDJSON data files and a manifest.json file.
List projects and their identifiers:
jama listprojects
Export database data only:
jama snapshotproject PROJECT_ID /path/to/snapshot
Export database data and original source files:
jama snapshotproject PROJECT_ID /path/to/snapshot --include-files
Restore a snapshot into a new project:
jama restoreproject /path/to/snapshot "Restored project"
Replace an existing project while keeping its identifier:
jama restoreproject /path/to/snapshot "Existing project" --replace-in-place
When --replace-in-place is used, Jamā creates a safety snapshot before
replacing the project. Source files are optional in snapshots; without
--include-files, the database rows are restored but the original files must
already be present in Jamā storage for media resources to be fully usable.
Derived IIIF and HLS files are not included in snapshots. They are regenerated after restore when the source files are available. Annotations are not included in the current snapshot format.
IIIF Notes
Jamā generates tiled image files and expects an IIIF-compatible image server to
serve them. IIPImage and Cantaloupe are typical choices. The exact
JAMA_IIIF_ENDPOINT, path separator, and WebP settings depend on the chosen
server.
For Cantaloupe 5.x, a common configuration is:
JAMA_USE_WEBP=0
JAMA_IIIF_PATH_SEPARATOR="%2F"
JAMA_IIIF_ENDPOINT="http://localhost:8182/iiif/2/"
Documentation and Source
The project repository is:
https://git.unicaen.fr/certic/jama
The source repository contains additional documentation, configuration details, and example systemd units.
1 maintainer
Metadata
1 maintainer
Release files for jama-CERTIC 0.7.4
For a detailed explanation of source distributions (sdists) and built distributions (wheels), please see the package formats documentation.
Source distribution (sdist)
| File | Size | Uploaded | |
|---|---|---|---|
| jama_certic-0.7.4.tar.gz | 6.3 MB | Details |
Built distribution (wheel)
| File | Interpreter | ABI | Platform | Reset |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| jama_certic-0.7.4-py3-none-any.whl | Python 3 | none | any | Details |
Total release size: 13.5 MB
Release files / jama_certic-0.7.4.tar.gz
| Download URL | jama_certic-0.7.4.tar.gz |
|---|---|
| Size | 6.3 MB |
| Tags | Source |
|
SHA-256 checksum How to use checksums |
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|
BLAKE2b-256 checksum How to use checksums |
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|
| Upload date | |
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Uploaded using Trusted Publishing? What is trusted publishing? |
No |
| Uploaded via |
uv/0.9.2
|
Release files / jama_certic-0.7.4-py3-none-any.whl
| Download URL | jama_certic-0.7.4-py3-none-any.whl |
|---|---|
| Size | 7.2 MB |
| Tags | Python 3 |
|
SHA-256 checksum How to use checksums |
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| Upload date | |
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Uploaded using Trusted Publishing? What is trusted publishing? |
No |
| Uploaded via |
uv/0.9.2
|
