sunpeek 0.2.21

Large Solar Thermal Monitoring Tool. Implements the Performance Check Method of ISO 24194

Core:

WebUI:

About SunPeek

SunPeek implements a dynamic, in situ test methodology for large solar thermal plants, packaged as an open source software application and python library. It also includes the first open source implementation of the ISO 24194 procedure for checking the yield of solar thermal collector fields

Full documentation is at https://docs.sunpeek.org

SunPeek was originally developed as part of the HarvestIT research project, see https://www.collector-array-test.org

A Web Application and a Python Library

SunPeek is available as both a complete, containerised web application - intended to make the ongoing monitoring of one or several solar thermal plants simple and intuitive - and as a python library, for use by researchers and for building into other tools. To install the python library, simply run pip install sunpeek. To set up the web application, see below.

License

Except where specifically noted otherwise, SunPeek is made available under the GNU Lesser General Public License. This means that you can use the software, copy it, redistribute it and include it in other software, including commercial, proprietary software, for free, as long as you abide by the terms of the GNU GPL, with the exceptions provided by the LGPL. In particular, if you redistribute a modified version of the software, you must make the source code of your modifications available, and if you include the software in another piece of software or physical product, you must give users notice that SunPeek is used, and inform them where to obtain a copy of the SunPeek source code and license.

Note that the SunPeek WebUI (https://gitlab.com/sunpeek/web-ui), is covered by a seperate licence, the BSD-3-Clause, see: https://opensource.org/licenses/BSD-3-Clause

Copyright (c) 2020-2022, AEE - Institut für Nachhaltige Technologien, SOLID Solar Energy Systems GmbH, GASOKOL GmbH, Schneid Gesellschaft m.b.H.
Copyright (c) 2023, SunPeek Open Source Contributors

SunPeek is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.

Run

Linux

The preferred way to run the SunPeek application is with docker on a Linux host. Running on Docker on Windows (see below) or installing directly on the host (not recommended) is also possible.

Deploy Full Application with Docker Compose

The full application can be run with docker compose. This requires docker engine 19.03+, supporting the docker compose command (instead of the older separate docker-compose tool). Use docker version to check. To install docker go to https://docs.docker.com/engine/install/ select the relevant platform and follow the instructions.

1. Use https://gitlab.com/api/v4/projects/43333900/repository/archive?path=deploy to download an archive of the deployment files and unzip it to the location you want to run it from.
2. Open api.env.template and set HIT_DB_PW to a strong random password
3. Open db.env.template and set POSTGRES_PASSWORD to the same strong random password.
4. If you want to access the application from anywhere except the local machine, open ui.env.template and replace localhost in HIT_API_BASE_URL with a URL which can be used to access the machine on which the application is running. IMORTANT: it is strongly recommended that you don't make SunPeek accessible from the public internet. At present there are NO built in access controls
5. In a terminal in the unzipped folder, run docker compose up -d
6. After at most 2 minutes (usually a few seconds), the web UI should be accessible at http://localhost, or the url set in step 4.

Windows

Get Docker

Windows 10 and 11

On desktop windows, the easiest way to get Docker is to install docker desktop.

Windows server

To install the Docker Engine on Windows Server, see this guide from Microsoft

Set up SunPeek

Using the Easy Installer

For convenience, if you wish to avoid using powershell, a simple graphical utility is provided for use on Windows. Docker is still required. NOTE: If you have previously set up SunPeek using the default configuration, you must first remove all stored data by running the command docker volume rm harvestit_hit_postgres_data, this will also remove uploaded data. You do not need to do this to update the software, simply open a command prompt in the folder where you stored the SunPeek configuration and run docker compose pull, then docker compose up -d

1. Download this file, and unzip it to a temporary location.
2. Run sunpeek_easy_installer.exe
3. You should then get a small window with 2 fields. You must select a location to store the configuration files for the application, if you are running the application only for access from the local machine, leave the default in the url field.
4. Click setup.
5. Once the window closes open the directory you specified, and double-click the start.bat file. A command prompt will open to display the startup process.
6. Docker compose will download the required application components, this may take several minutes, once you see all components listed as 'started' or 'healthy' you can close the command prompt.
7. Open a browser and go to the url specified in the setup tool, probably http://localhost to see the web-UI for the tool.
8. To stop the application, assuming no other processes are running under docker on your machine, simply shut down the docker engine. If you are using Docker Desktop, this can be done by right clicking the Docker icon the the system try and selecting Quit

Configuration

Configuration is via environment variables, which can be set by any configuration management system you use, however the default setup uses .env files. To deploy the application on a single host, only the database password and external URL need to be set. The .\quick-setup.ps1 or easy installer does this for you, or you can manually set the value of HIT_DB_PW and POSTGRES_PASSWORD in the api.env and db.env files to the same random, unique password string, and the value of HIT_API_BASE_URL in the ui.env file to <external.url>/api/v1.
NOTE: This setup is designed to deploy all containers on a single machine where docker compose is running. The configuration for the Traefik reverse proxy is stored in a directory which is bind mounted to the container. For other deployment approaches (e.g. using Kubernetes), a different a more appropriate Traefik dynamic configuration provider should be selected.

Technical Details - What does compose do?

Docker Compose is a tool for orchestrating docker containers, to create applications made up of several docker containers. When the HarvestIT application is started with the default docker-compose file, the following things happen:

1. Compose checks if each of the images defined in the compose file, is available with the correct tag locally, if not it pulls them from the relevant registry
2. A virtual network is created, for the containers to communicate with each other. This is segregated from the host machine's main network interfaces.
3. The database container (using image timescale/timescaledb:latest-pg14), is started, with a healthcheck defined. Alongside this container, a Docker Volume is created called hit_postgres_data, which is mapped to the default data directory in the database container, to ensure that database data is persisted when the containers are recreated (e.g. during an update).
4. The reverse proxy container (using image traefik:v2.8) is started. As well as being attached to the virtual network created by docker compose, this has port 80 exposed to the host, so that it can be accessed at localhost/ or from an extrnal connection. This routes web requests to either the web-ui or api containers, depending on the path in the request URL. It can also be configured to terminate TLS (HTTPS) encrypted connections and obtain certificates automatically, to secure connections to the application.
5. Compose waits until the database container reports a "healthy" status, then starts the api container (using image sunpeek:latest), this is the main HarvestIT application.
6. The harvestit container runs a database initialization scripts to get the database ready.
7. Once the api container has started, the webui container is started.

Developing

For information on contributing to sunpeek, see CONTRIBUTING.md, for developer documentation see https://docs.sunpeek.org/developing.html

Maintainers and Steering Committee

SunPeek is developed as an open source project, with contributions gladly accepted from interested members of the community. The overall direction of the project is managed by a steering committee, which currently consists of:

• Daniel Tschopp [e-mail]
• Philip Ohnewein [e-mail]
• Marnoch Hamilton-Jones [e-mail]
• Lukas Feierl [e-mail]
• Maria Moser [e-mail]

The steering committee appoints the project maintainers, and makes final decisions on which contributors have commit privileges on the official repository as well as ongoing implementation of new features and updates. The maintainers are responsible for reviewing and merging any merge (pull) requests. The current maintainers are:

• Marnoch Hamilton-Jones [e-mail]
• Lukas Feierl [e-mail]
• Philip Ohnewein [e-mail]