Installation of Arcsecond.local

INFO

As of now, the installation of Arcsecond.local requires an individual authentication token, provided manually by Arcsecond. In the future, the process will be streamlined and easier.

Prerequisites

Before proceeding with the installation, ensure that you have the following prerequisites met:

• A PC with sufficient resources (CPU, RAM, disk space) to run Arcsecond.local. The recommended settings are a recent CPU, 2GB+ of RAM (depending on number of potential users). Moreover, for normal operations, outside any consideration of long-term data storage, Arcsecond requires at least 50GB of disk storage to operate. It is used for database backups, astrometry cache, temporary images data etc.
• Docker is installed on your PC.
• pip is installed on your PC (you can open a Terminal and type pip3 to check first).
• Access to the Arcsecond Docker private registry, via the personal authentication token (PAT). Contact us to obtain yours.

Installation

INFO

The installation of Arcsecond requires you to write some simple commands in the Terminal. On *nix machines, you can use any shell. On Windows, with the installation of the WSL you have the possibility to install a small Linux distribution ("Distro"). Typically, with the Ubuntu Distro, you will have a bash shell. You may also stay with PowerShell if you wish of course.

:::

• Open the Terminal.
• Install the Arcsecond CLI: pip3 install arcsecond.
• Verify the installation was successful by running arcsecond --version.
• Create a directory where everything related to Arcsecond will be stored, and go inside it, with the terminal.
• Run the basic setup: arcsecond setup.
• You can check that you have a new .env file in the current directory, containing some secret keys.
• You should also have a file named docker-compose.yml with the Arcsecond system configuration.
• Have your PAT with you, and login once in the Arcsecond Docker registry (replace <PAT> with your PAT): echo <PAT> | docker login ghcr.io -u arcsecond-io --password-stdin
• You can now start Arcsecond.local with the command: docker compose up -d. The first time, Docker will download all the required images. It may take some time.

::: warn By convention, the chevrons indicate placeholders in the documentation. Hence, you must also remove them when inserting your PAT. For instance: echo ghp_XXX... | docker login... and not echo <ghp_XXX...> | docker login... :::

First steps

• Arcsecond.local is now accessible at the following address: http://localhost:5555
• You can login as admin / admin. We recommend that you change this password as soon as possible, by opening your "Account" panel, from the bottom-left menu.
• Before exploring the Arcsecond interface, you may want to create your first observing site, by clicking on the "Attach a Site" button, in the the top-right of the Times bar.

WARNING

In the first moments of Arcsecond.local, various things are being loaded and integrated into the database (timezones, exoplanets, etc). You may need to wait a bit before creating your first observing site.

• On the left-hand side, you have the Sidebar, with an access to the 3 Arcsecond "apps": "Night Studio", "Control Room" and "Data Grand Central".
• You may want to customise your sidebar and the associated tools by opening your "Settings" panel from the bottom-left menu.