Skip to main content

AdventureLog - Travel Helper

Overview

Travel Helper is a Python-based sidecar service for AdventureLog. It runs on a weekly schedule and automatically links Locations (based on their Visits) to Collections, populates day-by-day itinerary entries, and adds region-level Locations as Trip Context. It is idempotent — re-running it never creates duplicates.

It also exposes a status web page at https://travel-helper.home.local showing last run time, run statistics, live log output, and a manual trigger button.

Why It Exists

AdventureLog Collections support itinerary entries and linked Locations, but provides no automatic way to connect existing Visits to a Collection by date range. Without this service, every Collection must be linked manually, location by location.

Travel Helper solves this by scanning all Collections that have a start_date and end_date, finding every Location that has a Visit falling within that range, and wiring everything together automatically.

What It Does Each Run

  1. Loads all regions, locations (with embedded visits), and collections from AdventureLog.
  2. For each Collection with a date range:
    • Finds all Locations whose Visit dates (converted to local timezone) fall within the collection's start–end range.
    • Links those Locations to the Collection (PATCH /api/locations/{id}).
    • Adds a day-level itinerary entry per visit date (POST /api/itineraries, is_global: false).
    • Resolves the region for each matched Location (from cache → AdventureLog region field → Nominatim reverse geocode fallback).
    • Finds or creates a region-level Location (centroid of the region).
    • Links that region Location to the Collection and adds it as Trip Context (POST /api/itineraries, is_global: true).
  3. Persists the region ↔ location ID cache to /data/region_cache.json so Nominatim is only called for locations not yet resolved.

Access

Type URL
Internal https://travel-helper.home.local
External Not exposed

The status page auto-refreshes every 60 seconds when idle, every 10 seconds while a sync is running.

Configuration

Image: travel-helper:latest (built locally — see Maintenance)
Source: /home/jeeves/docker/adventurelog/travel-helper/
Bind mount: /home/jeeves/docker/adventurelog/travel-helper/data → /data

Key environment variables (set in Portainer stack environment table):

Variable Value / Notes
ADVENTURELOG_API_URLS Comma-separated, tried left-to-right. First reachable URL wins.
http://adventurelog-web:3000,https://travel.home.local,https://<external>
ADVENTURELOG_API_KEY Set in Portainer — never hardcode. Rotate here when key changes.
NOMINATIM_USER_AGENT Must include a contact email per Nominatim usage policy.
NOMINATIM_DELAY Seconds between Nominatim requests. Default 3.0. Do not lower.
CACHE_FILE /data/region_cache.json
CRON_DAY Day of week for scheduled run. Default mon.
CRON_HOUR UTC hour for scheduled run. Default 3.
STATUS_PORT Internal port for Flask status page. Default 80.

Networks:

  • adventurelog-internal — direct container-to-container access to AdventureLog
  • traefik-net — exposes the status page through Traefik

Traefik labels:

- "traefik.enable=true"
- "traefik.http.routers.travel-helper-int.rule=Host(`travel-helper.home.local`)"
- "traefik.http.routers.travel-helper-int.entrypoints=websecure"
- "traefik.http.routers.travel-helper-int.tls=true"
- "traefik.http.routers.travel-helper-int.tls.certresolver=step-ca"
- "traefik.http.services.travel-helper.loadbalancer.server.port=80"

Dependencies

Service Role
adventurelog-web AdventureLog Next.js frontend (port 3000) — primary API target
adventurelog-server Django backend — reached indirectly via Next.js proxy
Nominatim (external) Reverse geocoding for region resolution. Rate-limited at 1 req/3s
Traefik Routes travel-helper.home.local to the status page

URL Resolution (Internal-First)

On each run, Travel Helper probes ADVENTURELOG_API_URLS in order and uses the first URL that returns HTTP 200, 201, 401, or 403. This means:

  1. http://adventurelog-web:3000 is tried first (direct, never leaves host)
  2. https://travel.home.local is tried second (through Traefik internally)
  3. The external URL is a last resort only

The resolved URL is shown on the status page. If the internal network is healthy, you should always see http://adventurelog-web:3000 displayed there.

Nominatim Usage

Nominatim is only called when a Location's region cannot be resolved from:

  1. The in-memory cache (populated from region_cache.json on startup)
  2. The region field already set on the AdventureLog Location record

On first run, most locations are resolved from the existing geocode_cache.json (generated during the original Swarm import) without hitting Nominatim at all. Subsequent runs only call Nominatim for newly imported locations.

Requests use accept-language=en and zoom=10 to return English region names at state/province level. Rate limiting: 3-second base delay with exponential backoff (3s → 12s → 48s) on HTTP 429.

Gotchas

  • No trailing slashes on AdventureLog API URLs. AdventureLog returns 308 Permanent Redirect for URLs ending in /. HTTP clients drop the POST body on 308 redirects, causing silent 400 Bad Request failures. All endpoints in this service omit trailing slashes.

  • adventurelog-web listens on port 3000, not 8000. Port 8000 is exposed by adventurelog-server (Django), but API calls must go through the Next.js frontend which proxies /api/ to the backend.

  • Collections must have both start_date and end_date to be processed. Collections with only one date or no dates are silently skipped.

  • Visit dates are converted to local timezone before matching. A visit at 11 pm in Toronto is June 22 locally but June 23 in UTC. The visit's IANA timezone field is used for this conversion. If the field is absent, UTC is used as a fallback.

  • loc_collections is maintained in-memory across collections in one run. This prevents overwriting a location's collection list when it matches multiple collections in the same run.

  • The itinerary content_type for Location is 24. This is an internal AdventureLog FK constant. If a future AdventureLog update changes this, the constant LOCATION_CONTENT_TYPE = 24 in main.py must be updated.

  • API key expiry. The AdventureLog API key can be rotated in AdventureLog under User Settings → API Tokens. Update it in Portainer's environment variable table for the AdventureLog stack — never in any file.

Status Page Features

Available at https://travel-helper.home.local:

Section Contents
Service Status Running/Idle badge, resolved AdventureLog URL, last/next run times
Last Run Results Collections matched, locations linked, itinerary entries, Trip Context entries, error count
Errors — Last Run Timestamped list of all ERROR-level log entries from the last run
Live Log Last 80 log lines, newest first, auto-refreshes
Run Now button Triggers an immediate sync in a background thread

GET /health returns a JSON summary suitable for uptime monitoring.

Maintenance

Rebuilding the image after code changes

docker build -t travel-helper:latest /home/jeeves/docker/adventurelog/travel-helper

Then redeploy the AdventureLog stack in Portainer. Portainer uses the pre-built travel-helper:latest image — it does not build from source.

Rotating the API key

  1. Generate a new token in AdventureLog → User Settings → API Tokens
  2. Update ADVENTURELOG_API_KEY in the AdventureLog stack's environment variable table in Portainer
  3. Redeploy the stack

Clearing the region cache

Delete /home/jeeves/docker/adventurelog/travel-helper/data/region_cache.json. The next run will rebuild it from AdventureLog region fields and Nominatim (expect the run to take longer and make Nominatim calls).

Adjusting the schedule

Change CRON_DAY and CRON_HOUR in Portainer environment variables and redeploy. Times are UTC.

Checking logs outside the status page

docker logs travel-helper --tail 100 -f

How It Was Built

Travel Helper was developed iteratively during a session in June 2026 as a companion to the Swarm → AdventureLog bulk import (import_swarm.py). The original import created ~7,000 Locations and ~10,000 Visits but left Collections unlinked. Key design decisions:

  • Python + APScheduler for the weekly cron, matching the import toolchain
  • Flask for the status page, styled to match the Swarm-Reitti Bridge dashboard
  • Internal-first URL probing to avoid unnecessary external traffic; the service lives on adventurelog-internal so direct container access is always preferred
  • Full re-scan on every run (idempotent) rather than incremental sync, to avoid state management complexity
  • region_cache.json pre-seeded from the Swarm import's geocode_cache.json so that ~95% of locations resolve without any Nominatim calls on first run

Last Updated

2026-06-24

No comments to display

Back to top