reports

Why reports?

reports.calitp.org exists to provide a snapshot of transit service information and transit data quality information for agencies across California. It also serves to connect agencies and other stakeholders with technical assistance from Cal-ITP and Caltrans.

When and how to generate reports

We manually update the reports site on a monthly cycle, usually in the first or second week of a calendar month. This generates content for the previous month, for example updating the site in the first week of December will add content for November.

After the site is updated, we manually send emails using a list provided by the Cal-ITP Customer Success team.

Generating reports via GitHub Actions

This is the easiest option to generate the reports site. Simply open the Build and deploy to Netlify Action, and use the "Run workflow" drop-down to generate the development or production Reports site.

You must generate the development site before the production site. The development site can be reviewed at https://test--cal-itp-reports.netlify.app (url may change, can confirm by viewing the Deploy development to Netlify section in an Action run). Check that the development site looks good before running a production build. The development Action also stages necessary data to build the production site with the latest information.

Sending reports emails

This step is not currently included in the GitHub Action. After obtaining an updated email list in the form of a csv file, it can be ran via JupyterHub or another platform.

Navigate to the subdirectory, i.e. (cd reports), and:

1. Access to Postmark (ask via Slack).
   • If necessary, ask for credentials in #product-reports-site, #services-team, etc
2. Update the config file and email list.
   • All code variables are stored in a config file. config-example.ini is an example config file that shows what the script is expecting in terms of inputs. Create your own config.ini using the example config as a template and populate accordingly, including development and production postmark_server_token.
   • Each month, update year (if needed), month and month_name.
   • test_emails.csv is a test csv that mimics the production data without any actual client emails.
   • Obtain an updated email list and place in the subdirectory (but do not commit to GitHub).
   • Start with test_emails.csv specified in both development and production.
3. Generate the template (if needed).
   • We are using the mjml markup language to generate the html body and styling of the template. Both the report email and its compiled output is stored in the /templates/email. If changes to the email contents are required, then the template should be updated. It is worth mentioning that mjml should use lowercase names to match the config file.
   • This step is currently somewhat difficult. If email content changes are necessary, use the existing template as a guide and be certain to do a test run before sending to all recipients.
4. Script execution
   • Within the reports subfolder run script with the config section name as an argument. It will be development or production depending on the need. For example: poetry run python generate_report_emails.py development (you may need to run poetry install first).
   • If the script hangs, try installing mjml first by running npx mjml.
   • Note that the development option doesn't actually send any emails. We reccomend first running the production option with the test emails in order to confirm the actual email content before sending to the wider list.
   • After sending production emails to test recipients and confirming they look good, now switch the config file production email_csv_path to your updated email list. Rerun the production script. It will prompt you to confirm the list of recipents. Once those emails are sent, the process is complete!
5. Verify emails successfully sent.
   • In Postmark account, within the tracking tab it will display email status and other helpful information like if the email has been opened etc.

Generating reports on another platform

It is possible to generate the reports site outside the GitHub Action. Follow the instructions below, but note that it's not currently possible to generate the site locally on a Caltrans computer. It is possible to generate the reports and, importantly, send the reports emails on JupyterHub.

Set up Google Cloud credentials

If running on JupyterHub and you've completed the usual analyst onboarding, no need to repeat this step. Otherwise: Set up google cloud authentication credentials.

Specifically, download the SDK/CLI at the above link, install it, create a new terminal/source a .zshrc and be sure to run both

1. gcloud init
2. gcloud auth application-default login

Note that with a user account authentication, the environment variable CALITP_SERVICE_KEY_PATH should be unset.

Running with make and poetry

The Makefile located in the reports/ subdirectory includes the necessary commands to generate the reports. poetry handles the required Python dependencies and environment.

Navigate to the subdirectory, i.e. (cd reports), and run:

poetry install
poetry run make parameters
poetry run make data

If a clean start is necessary, first run:

poetry run make clean

Building the website

Once the report data has been generated navigate to the website subfolder (i.e. cd ../website), install the npm dependencies if you haven't done so already, and build the website.

poetry run npm install
poetry run npm run build

These commands perform the following:

• Python script website/generate.py loads JSON from the reports/outputs/YYYY/MM/ITPID/data directory and applies it to template files in /templates
• HTML templates written with Jinja
• CSS written with SCSS and Tailwind via PostCSS
• JS behavior added with Alpine.js
  • Bundled with Rollup
• Build scripts via NPM

It is worth mentioning that npm run build will currently only execute if you have data from previous months. Run npm run dev for verbose output and to see which month is failing, which can help with troubleshooting.

Note that the error:

jinja2.exceptions.UndefinedError: 'feed_info' is undefined

Is often due to a lack of generated reports. This can be remedied for prior months by rsyncing the reports from the upstream source (see Fetching report data), and ensuring every single ITPID has a corresponding generated report for the current month (see Generating reports).

Viewing the website (not possible via JupyterHub)

To check that everything is rendered appropriately, go into the website/build (i.e. cd build) directory:

python -m http.server

and open up a web browser, and navigate to: localhost:8000

Unfortunately it's not possible to do this if running on JupyterHub. You can view the finished site changes by including them on the development site, for example by first merging a PR and viewing the development site generated by the GitHub action.

Implementation details

Repository structure

This repository is set up in two pieces:

• reports/ subfolder - generates underlying GTFS data for each report.
• website/ subfolder - uses generate.py and ../templates/ to create the static reports website.

Local artifacts

Execute make parameters to generate the following artifacts.

• outputs/index_report.json - a file that lists every agency name and outputs/YYYY/MM folder
• outputs/rt_feed_ids.json - labels agencies by whether they have an RT feed
• outputs/speedmap_urls.json - labels agencies with their RT speedmap URL, if one exists
• Empty outputs/YYYY/MM/AGENCY_ITP_ID/ folder for each agency

GitHub Action Triggers

• For development, pushing a commit (or merging a PR) to the main branch
• For production, pushing a tag
• Alternatively, manually start the workflow and select development or production

Additional options

Fetch existing report data

This is rarely required since by default, the commands above will quickly generate reports data for all months. However, it remains possible to run gsutil rsync to update all the locally stored reports. Note that test-calitp-reports-data can be replaced with calitp-reports-data for testing on production data:

gsutil -m rsync -r gs://test-calitp-reports-data/report_gtfs_schedule outputs

Run reports data selectively

Also unnecesssary if using the defualt commands, it is possible to selectively run a single month's reports. Execute poetry run python generate_reports_data.py --year=2023 --month=02 to populate those output folders for a given month with the following files (per folder).

• 1_feed_info.json
• 2_daily_service_hours.json
• 3_routes_changed.json
• 3_stops_changed.json
• 4_guideline_checks_schedule.json
• 5_validation_codes.json

These files are used to generate the static HTML (see below).

NOTE that the --month refers to the month of the folders that will be generated, NOT the month in which the reports are published (typically on the first day of the month). For example, poetry run python generate_reports_data.py --year=2023 --month=02 will populate outputs/2023/02/* folders, whereas the publish_date for the data in those folders is 2023-03-01.

Validating the report creation

After generation, the reports can be validated by running poetry run python validate_reports.py. This examines all of the output folders and ensures that the generated files are present and that they follow the same schema.

Additionally, you can see if there are any missing files by running:

find ./outputs/2023 -mindepth 3 -maxdepth 3 -type f '!' -exec test -e "1_feed_info.json" ';' -print

If there is a missing month, an individual month can be run with the following command:

python generate_reports_data.py -v --f outputs/YYYY/MM/AGENCY_NUM/1_file_info.json

Testing

Tests can be run locally from the tests directory by running python test_report_data.py. These tests are run on commits through a github action.

Manually Pushing Data to Google Cloud

Since this is part of the development GitHub Action, it's not necessary to run manually. Info below for reference.

Pushing to Development

The next step is to update the development bucket in google cloud with the new data. In the case where data must be overwritten (please use caution!) a -d flag can be added to the command to "mirror" the buckets, i.e. delete destination data that isn't being copied from the source.

gsutil -m rsync -r [-d] outputs/ gs://test-calitp-reports-data/report_gtfs_schedule/

Pushing to Production

Assuming that all the data is correct in development, you can sync the test data to production.

gsutil -m rsync -r gs://test-calitp-reports-data/report_gtfs_schedule/ gs://calitp-reports-data/report_gtfs_schedule/

running with Docker-compose (deprecated)

Note that the folder also contains a docker-compose.yml, so it is possible to run the build inside docker by running these commands first. In this case, docker first needs to be installed locally, setting resources as desired (i.e. enable 6 cores if you have an 8 core machine, etc). Open a terminal and navigate to the root folder of a locally cloned repo and enter:

docker-compose run --rm --service-ports calitp_reports /bin/bash

If google credentials are already configured on the host, the local credential files should already be mounted in the container, but it may only be necessary to run gcloud auth application-default login from within the container.