CAST: Candidate Alert System for Transients

CAST is a Target and Observation Manager (TOM) system designed to manage and follow up on astronomical transient candidates from the Large Array Survey Telescope (LAST; Ofek et al. 2023). It builds on the TOM Toolkit and adds custom functionality such as a scanning page for the survey through the Candidates app.

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🚀 Installation

1. Install a Base TOM System

First, install a basic TOM system by following the instructions at:
👉 https://github.com/TOMToolkit/tom_base

This sets up a Django-based TOM project that CAST builds upon.

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2. Install the candidates App

Once your TOM base project is running, install the candidates application:

1. Copy or clone the candidates app into your TOM project directory.

   If you want to work with git, perform the following commands from your TOM directory:

   git init .
   git remote add origin [email protected]:erezimm/CAST.git
   git pull origin master 
   

2. Add it to your Django INSTALLED_APPS in settings.py:

   INSTALLED_APPS = [
       # ... existing apps
       'candidates',
       'LAST',
       'FP',
   ]

3. Run database migrations:

   python manage.py makemigrations candidates
   python manage.py migrate

3. Update settings.py Configuration

1. Add the path to the transient folder to your settings.py:

   # Transients settings
   TRANSIENT_DIR = '/path/to/transients/'  # Change this to your actual directory

2. Add your Transient Name Server (TNS) credentials:

   BROKERS = {
     'TNS': {
        'api_key': '',
        'bot_id': '',
        'bot_name': '',
      ...
   
    },

   NOTE: For development, update the wis-tns urls to sandbox.wis-tns.org:

   In the file candidates/models.py, find and replace www.wis-tns.org with sandbox.wis-tns.org (2 occurences)

3. **Add LAST_DB for Observation page and FORCED_PHOTOMETRY_DB **:

   LAST_DB = {
    'host': '',  # host of last0
    'port': ,
    'username': '', 
    'password': ''
    },
   
   FORCED_PHOTOMETRY_DB = {
      'host': '', # host of euclid
      'port': '',
      'username': '', 
      'password': '',
      'CAST_user_id': , 
   }

4. **For Observation page - make sure you set both STATIC dirs to the same path**:
 ```python
 STATIC_URL = '/static/'
 STATIC_ROOT = os.path.join(BASE_DIR, 'static')
 STATICFILES_DIRS = [os.path.join(BASE_DIR, '_static')]  # make sure STATICFILES_DIR does not contain STATIC_ROOT

4. Update urls.py file

Make sure you have the django imports and the about/ and candidates/ paths in urlpatterns

from django.urls import path, include
from django.views.generic import TemplateView

urlpatterns = [
    path('', include('tom_common.urls')),
    path('about/', TemplateView.as_view(template_name='about.html'), name='about'),
    path('candidates/', include('candidates.urls')),  # Include URLs for the candidates app
    path('LAST/', include('LAST.urls')),  # Include URLs for the LAST app
    path('FP/', include('FP.urls')),
]

5. Final Steps

1. Collect static files:

   python manage.py collectstatic

2. Run the development server:

   python manage.py runserver

3. Create plots directory for Observation page In your TOM directory, enter '_statc' folder and create the subfolers '_statc\LAST\plots'.

Open http://127.0.0.1:8000 in your browser to use the application.