xcube Viewer Flavour

This Ansible Playbook configures an existing virtual machine running within the European Weather Cloud (EWC) with the xcube Viewer to visualize Earth Observation data in a user-friendly graphical user interface.

Functionality

The template is designed to:

• Configure a pre-existing virtual machine running Ubuntu 24.04, with public IP address, and a minimum recommended 8GB of RAM, with the xcube Viewer - a web-based visualization tool that enables users to:
  • Interactively explore and visualize multi-dimensional Earth Observation data
  • Display data from various sources including remote S3-compatible object storage
  • View time-series data with animation capabilities
  • Customize visualization with different color maps and overlays
  • Access data through a user-friendly web interface at http://<your-vm>.<tenancy-name>.<s|f>.ewcloud.host:80/viewer

For more information about xcube capabilities, please refer to the xcube Documentation.

Prerequisites

⚠️ Only Ubuntu 24.04 is supported.

💡 A VM plan with at least 8GB of RAM is recommended for successful setup and stable operation.

• Install git (version 2.0 or higher)
• Install python (version 3.9 or higher)
• Install ansible (version 2.15 or higher)

Usage

1. Clone the repository

git clone https://github.com/ewcloud/ewc-ansible-playbook-flavours-and-provisioning.git

1.1. Change to the specific Item's subdirectory

cd playbooks/xcube-viewer-flavour

1.2. (Optional) Checkout a specific Item's version

⚠️ Make sure to replace x.y.z in the command below, with your version of preference.

git checkout x.y.z

2. Download Ansible dependencies

💡 By default, Ansible Roles are installed under the ~/.ansible/roles directory within your working environment.

Download the correct version of the Ansible dependencies, if you haven't done so already:

ansible-galaxy role install -r requirements.yml

3. Specify the target host and SSH credentials

Create an inventory file to specify address/credentials that Ansible should use to reach the virtual machine you wish to configure:

# inventory.yml
---
ewcloud:
  hosts:
    xcube_viewer:
      ansible_python_interpreter: /usr/bin/python3
      ansible_host: <add the IPV4 address of the target host>
      ansible_ssh_private_key_file: <add the path to local SSH private key file>
      ansible_user: <add-username>
      ansible_ssh_common_args: -o StrictHostKeyChecking=accept-new

4. Configure and apply the template

4.1. Interactive Mode

By running the following command, you can trigger an interactive session that prompts you for the necessary user inputs, and then applies changes to your target EWC environment:

ansible-playbook -i inventory.yml xcube-viewer-flavour.yml

4.2. Non-Interactive Mode

💡 To learn more about defining variables at runtime, checkout the official Ansible documentation.

You can also run in non-interactive mode by passing the --extra-vars or -e flag, followed by a map of key-value pairs for each available input (see inputs section below). For example:

ansible-playbook \
  -i inventory.yml \
  -e '{
      "tenancy_name": "your-tenancy",
      "federee": "EUMETSAT",
      "xcube_env_wipe": "no",
      "xcube_env_name": "xcube-demo",
      "conda_installer": "https://github.com/conda-forge/miniforge/releases/latest/download/Miniforge3-Linux-x86_64.sh",
      "conda_update_base": "false",
      "conda_prefix": "/opt/conda",
      "conda_user": "root",
      "xcube_config_location": "./templates/xcube-demo-config.yml"
    }' \
  xcube-viewer-flavour.yml

Inputs

Dependencies

💡 Upon execution, a SBOM (SPDX format) is auto-generated and stored in the VM's file system root directory (see /sbom.json).

Applying this template will trigger the installation of the following open-source packages onto your desired target host:

Ansible Roles

Python Packages