mertvn / vgmdb

A custom frontend for vgmdb, providing JSON and RDF

VGMdb

VGMdb.net is an excellent resource, containing gigabytes of information about video game music. It documents the relationships between games, albums that represent games, and all the people that contributed to an album.

However, VGMdb does not provide an API to access its information, which provides an obstacle to programs that want to use its information. This site is a way to programmatically access the information on VGMdb.net.

VGMdb.net stores the information of each item at a friendly URL, such as album/79 or artist/137. This friendly url will work on this site. Once there, an overview of the item's information can be found, along with a few extra features.

Usage

In the right sidebar, there are links to view the page's information in different formats. The raw information that has been parsed out of the original VGMdb.net item is available in JSON format by adding ?format=json to any URL. The YAML format is also available for this information, available by adding ?format=yaml.

Additionally, an effort has been made to produce RDF tuples representing some of the information in VGMdb. The default HTML view of the data has RDFa encoded into it, allowing any RDFa library to parse the page. Additionally, RDF/XML and Turtle serialization formats are available.

The page will produce the output format that most-closely matches the request's HTTP Accept header. A particular format can be forced by adding ?format=html, ?format=xml, or ?format=turtle arguments to the URL

There are also links to validation services, to verify that the page's data is in fact valid and parseable in the respective formats. The main page doesn't produce any other formats, but every other page does.

Development and Installation

Unit tests are employed, both in the parsing and in the output stages, to validate that the information is being correctly parsed and encoded. Run the tests.sh script to run the tests.

Most of any runtime requirements should be documented in requirements.txt. Use pip install -r requirements.txt to install them.

The run.py example script will start up an HTTP server process for the site. An example Apache2 configuration, using mod_wsgi, is also provided. It should work just as well under any other WSGI server.

The docker/docker-build.sh script should produce a vgmdb_reqs base image with the dependencies and a vgmdb image with the current version of the code installed. This image exposes port 80, and vgmdb/autoload_settings.py implements loading optional dependencies and settings based on environment variables.