[ckan-dev] A couple of new extensions

Denis Zgonjanin deniszgonjanin at gmail.com
Thu Aug 13 19:58:27 UTC 2015


A couple of CKAN extensions which I've been working on are good enough to
share now, so I thought I'd let people know about them in case anybody
finds them useful:

1. Webhooks: https://github.com/datacats/ckanext-webhooks
A problem I've had personally is having my open data apps know when a
dataset they've been using has been updated. You can of course poll CKAN
periodically, but then you need cron jobs or a queue, and when you're using
a cheap PaaS like heroku for your apps, integrating queues and cron is just
an extra hassle.

This extension lets people register a URL with CKAN, which CKAN will call
when a certain event happens - for example, a dataset update. The extension
uses the built-in CKAN celery queue, so as to be non-blocking.

If you do end up using it, there are still a bunch of nice features to be
built, including a simple web interface through which users can register
webhooks (right now they can only be created through the action API)

2. Geopusher: https://github.com/datacats/ckanext-geopusher
So you know how you have a lot of Shapefiles and KML files in your CKANs
(because government), but your users prefer GeoJSON? This extension will
automatically convert shapefiles and KML into GeoJSON, and create a new
GeoJSON resource within that dataset. There are some cases where this won't
work depending on complexity of SHP or KML file, but it works well in
general.

This extension also uses the built-in celery queue to do its work, so for
both of these extensions you will need to start the celery daemon in order
to use them:

`paster --plugin=ckan celeryd -c development.ini`

Thanks,
- Denis
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