Actinia — The GRASS GIS REST API

Software Article

Actinia is an open source REST API for scalable, distributed, high performance processing of geographical data that mainly uses GRASS GIS for computational tasks.

It provides a REST API to process satellite images, time series of satellite images, arbitrary raster data with geographical relations and vector data.

The REST interface allows to access, manage and manipulate the GRASS GIS database via HTTP GET, PUT, POST and DELETE requests and to process raster, vector and time series data located in a persistent GRASS GIS database. Actinia allows the processing of cloud-based data, for example all Landsat 4-8 scenes as well as all Sentinel-2 scenes in ephemeral databases. The computational results of ephemeral processing are available via object storage as GeoTIFF files.

API documentation

The full API documentation is available here

actinia command execution - actinia shell

There is also an option to interactively control actinia. For details, see here.

Installation

Required system packages:

• alpine: apk add python3 py3-pip As not all python packages are pre-build for alpine, they need to be build during installation. For this some system packages are required: apk add python3 py3-pip python3-dev gcc musl-dev linux-headers build-base gdal gdal-tools gdal-dev proj proj-util proj-dev geos-dev py3-numpy-dev
• ubuntu: apt install -y python3 python3-pip

And then install from pypi:

pip install actinia-core

Installation with Docker

Docker images are available from https://hub.docker.com/r/mundialis/actinia-core

docker pull mundialis/actinia-core

For own deployments or local dev-setup, see the docker/ subfolder.

Actinia is also available on OSGeoLive.

Examples

Data management

• List all projects that are available in the actinia persistent database:

curl -u 'demouser:gu3st!pa55w0rd' -X GET "https://actinia.mundialis.de/api/v3/projects"

• List all mapsets in the project latlong_wgs84:

curl -u 'demouser:gu3st!pa55w0rd' -X GET "https://actinia.mundialis.de/api/v3/projects/latlong_wgs84/mapsets"

• List all space-time raster datasets (STRDS) in project latlong_wgs84 and mapset Sentinel_timeseries:

curl -u 'demouser:gu3st!pa55w0rd' -X GET "https://actinia.mundialis.de/api/v3/projects/latlong_wgs84/mapsets/modis_ndvi_global/strds"

• List all raster map layers of the STRDS:

curl -u 'demouser:gu3st!pa55w0rd' -X GET "https://actinia.mundialis.de/api/v3/projects/latlong_wgs84/mapsets/modis_ndvi_global/strds/ndvi_16_5600m/raster_layers"

Landsat and Sentinel-2 NDVI computation

• Compute the NDVI of the top of athmosphere (TOAR) corrected Landsat4 scene LC80440342016259LGN00:

curl -u 'demouser:gu3st!pa55w0rd' -X POST "https://actinia.mundialis.de/api/v3/landsat_process/LC80440342016259LGN00/TOAR/NDVI"

• NDVI computation of Sentinel-2A scene S2A_MSIL1C_20170212T104141_N0204_R008_T31TGJ_20170212T104138:

curl -u 'demouser:gu3st!pa55w0rd' -X POST "https://actinia.mundialis.de/api/v3/sentinel2_process/ndvi/S2A_MSIL1C_20170212T104141_N0204_R008_T31TGJ_20170212T104138"

The results of the asynchronous computations are available as GeoTIFF file in a cloud storage for download.

List of available endpoints

To see a simple list of endpoints (and more), consult the "paths" section in the API JSON; or, to list the available endpoints on command line, run

# sudo npm install -g json
curl -u 'demouser:gu3st!pa55w0rd' -X GET https://actinia.mundialis.de/api/v3/swagger.json | json paths | json -ka

Development

Use pre-commit

It is highly recommended to install and use pre-commit before submitting any new or modified code or any other content. The pre-commit Git hooks set checks validity and executes automated formatting for a range of file formats, including Python. Pre-commit installs all necessary tools in a virtual environment upon first use.

If you never used pre-commit before, you must start by installing it on your system. You only do it once:

python -m pip install pre-commit

Pre-commit must then be activated in the code repository. Change the directory to the root folder and use the install command:

cd <actinia-core_source_dir>

# once per repo
pre-commit install

Pre-commit will then be automatically triggered by the git commit command. If it finds any problem it will abort the commit and try to solve it automatically. In that case review the changes and run again git add and git commit.

It is also possible to run pre-commit manually, e.g:

pre-commit run flake8 --all-files
pre-commit run black --all-files
# pre-commit run yamllint --all-files
# pre-commit run markdownlint --all-files

Or to target a specific set of files:

pre-commit run --files src/*

The pre-commit hooks set is defined in .pre-commit-config.yaml.

It is possible to temporally disable the pre-commit hooks in the repo, e.g. while working on older branches:

pre-commit uninstall

And to reactivate pre-commit again:

git switch main
pre-commit install

Thanks to all contributors ❤