User Guide

Setup

System Dependencies

SkyPortal Fink Client requires the following software to be installed on your system:

• Python 3.8 or later

Source download

Clone the skyportal-fink-client repository and start a new virtual environment:

git clone https://github.com/skyportal-contrib/skyportal-fink-client.git

(You can also use conda or pipenv to create your environment.)

Python environment and dependencies

Lets install the dependencies required in a python virtual environment:

cd skyportal-fink-client
virtualenv env
source env/bin/activate
pip install -r requirements.txt

Configuration

Now that the dependencies are installed, the last step before using the client is to configure it. In order to do this, we'll guide you on what to edit in the config.yaml configuration file.

Overview

Here's a quick overview of the configuration file:

username: 'fink_user_name'
password: 'fink_user_password'
group_id: 'your_fink_group'
servers: localhost:9093
mytopics:
  ["test_stream"]
testing: false
skyportal_url: http://localhost:5000
skyportal_token: 9d2530a0-a3dc-446b-9cf9-968736699e5a

Fink credentials

Let's start by looking at the username and password fields. These are the credentials used to authenticate with Fink broker. If you don't have those credentials, you can apply HERE to get them.

You can simply replace the fink_user_name and fink_user_password with your credentials.

Same procedure as above for the servers and group_id field. These are the address of the Fink broker's server and port you want to connect to, and the fink broker group that your user is in. You received those along with your credentials.

Fink Topics

The mytopics field is a list of topics that you want to subscribe to. The topics are fink topics, to learn more about it, click HERE.

Each topic contains objects that have been classified, and then passed through specific filters that correspond to the topic (one fink filter = one topic of alerts). By the way, after polling the alert, we will recreate the classification using Fink Filters, which will be used to classify the alert in SkyPortal.

Testing

This simple argument is a boolean that indicates whether you want to run the client in testing mode. This is meant for development purposes, and should be set to false in production (when a normal user uses it with a real instance of SkyPortal).

SkyPortal Credentials

The skyportal_url and skyportal_token fields are used to connect to the SkyPortal instance. The url is simply the address of the SkyPortal instance, and the token is an api token that you can create and/or find in your SkyPortal's user profile. The skyportal_group field is the group that you want the alerts to belong to. On SkyPortal, if a user wants to see the data you poll from Fink, he should be in this group.