Run it locally

The fast path to a running app from source — no Docker, just uv. Good for development and poking around.

Prerequisites

• Python 3.12+
• uv (the package/venv manager this project uses)

Clone and install

git clone https://github.com/kbennett2000/backscatter.git
cd backscatter
uv sync          # creates a venv and installs everything (incl. dev tools)

uv sync reads pyproject.toml + uv.lock, so you get the exact pinned dependency set (including Py-ART and the rest of the scientific stack).

Configure your location

Same env vars as the Docker setup — set them in your shell (or a .env that your shell sources). The simplest:

export BACKSCATTER_LOCATIONS='[{"name":"Home","lat":39.3603,"lon":-104.5969,"default":true}]'

Everything is read in one place (config.py); no module reads the environment directly.

Run the pieces

backscatter is one CLI with a few subcommands:

uv run backscatter serve        # the web UI + API at http://localhost:8085
uv run backscatter collect      # the continuous collector (pull → render → index)

In real use you run both (that's what the container does). For a quick look, run serve in one terminal and collect in another.

It starts empty — give it data fast

A fresh checkout has no radar yet. Either let collect run for a while, or pull a chunk of history immediately with a backfill:

uv run backscatter backfill --start 2026-06-01T00:00:00Z --end 2026-06-01T03:00:00Z --dry-run

Drop --dry-run (and add --yes) once the preview looks right.

Handy one-offs

uv run backscatter site --near "39.36,-104.60"   # which radar covers a point?
uv run backscatter pull KFTG                      # fetch the latest volume for one site
uv run backscatter render path/to/VOLUME_V06      # render a single frame to a PNG
uv run backscatter prune --dry-run                # preview retention cleanup

Where things live on disk: raw radar volumes and rendered PNGs go under data/, with a small SQLite index (data/backscatter.db). All of it is git-ignored.

Next: see how it fits together, or run the tests.