Inquiry about the Voyager environment install: Unable to create Articles in Voyager Story

[kemco2019]

We are building a Voyager environment on an Ubuntu server, based on the instructions in the Voyager manual (https://smithsonian.github.io/dpo-voyager/introduction/installation/ ).

While we have successfully displayed 3D demo models in the browser, we are encountering the following issues in the Voyager Story editing mode.

1. "Create Folder" button is not working

2. Unable to create Articles

• When we create an Article, it initially appears as if it has been successfully created. However, attempting to edit the newly created Article results in the message: "Check asset name."

• We can create Annotations without any problems.
• Console logs indicate missing resources.

We suspect that the Web DAV server may not be functioning properly, or that the absence of a backend CMS could be causing this issue.

Since we are not yet fully familiar with WebDav and CMS, we would appreciate any guidance on identifying the cause and resolving this issue step by step.

Thank you in advance for your support.

[gjcope]

Hi @kemco2019 ,

Are you using the Docker image with the included express server or are you using your own WebDAV server? If the latter, it may be an issue similar to #339 where we found the server implementation wasn't returning the expected properties.

[kemco2019]

Thank you for your response!

We are using the former one, the Docker image with the included Express server. However, we are not entirely sure what specific settings need to be configured for it to work properly.…

[gjcope]

Could you also share what console errors you may be getting when creating an article? This could be helpful in exposing the issue as well.

[kemco2019]

Thank you for your response!

I checked the console errors when creating an article, and here is what I found:

Failed to load resource: the server responded with a status of 405 (Method Not Allowed)

[gjcope]

Hi @kemco2019 - Is the machine that you are running it on a server or have any server software that would be handling the requests before they get to Voyager? If so, it looks like you may just need to enable WebDAV there. If not, can you post a screenshot of the actual request that is failing with the above error? You can find it in the network tab of your browser console. On Chrome it would look something like this:

Thanks!

[kemco2019]

We are running Voyager together with Apache.

I checked the network tab in the browser and here is the screenshot of the request details:

Since we are not sure how to configure WebDAV, we would like to ask for clarification.

Previously, I mentioned that we were using the included server, but it seems our situation is similar to #339. Does this mean that we need to manually enable WebDAV?

We have confirmed that WebDAV modules are already enabled by running the following commands: a2enmod dav, a2enmod dav_fs and both returned messages indicating that the modules were already enabled.

Our understanding is that the next step is to edit /etc/apache2/sites-available/000-default.conf and modify the configuration so that WebDAV is enabled for the entire Voyager project folder.

<Directory /path/to/voyager/project>
    DAV On
    Options Indexes FollowSymLinks
    Require all granted
</Directory>

Is this the correct approach?

Thank you for your help.

[gjcope]

Hi @kemco2019 ,

Yes, based on your request response it looks like WebDAV is not configured correctly for the application directory via Apache. You can seet that the 'allowed methods' section in your screen shot is missing the PUT method that can be seen in mine. Unfortunately I have very limited experience with Apache so I can't be much help, but what you posted looks right.

The #339 situation is a little different as they were not using the included web server but a separate one (SabreDAV) that needed to be configured. In this case, we just need to make sure that Apache is letting the requests through. The included express server should already be configured correctly.

[gjcope]

Hi @kemco2019 ,

If just using the Docker image provide with the Voyager package, there is no configuration or enabling needed. It uses a WebDAV server Node module that is already configured (https://www.npmjs.com/package/webdav-server). I don't have much server expertise but the only other thing that comes to mind is if there is a permissions issue with the filesystem where the scenes are located. When you spin up the Node project do you get any errors. Something like shown here?

dpo-voyager/source/server/index.ts

Line 81 in da367ce

console.error(`failed to mount WebDAV file system at '${fileDir}'`);

A successfully launched server should have output looking something like the below:

[kemco2019]

(I am sorry that this is the repost)

Hi @gjcope, thank you so much for your support!

We encountered a 409 error after modifying the Apache WebDAV configuration (/etc/apache2/sites-available/000-default.conf).

To simplify troubleshooting, we recreated the setup on a local machine, but now we are encountering a 405 error again. Could you provide guidance on how to enable WebDAV with Express server?

[kemco2019]

Hi, @gjcope , thank you again for your help,

It seems that no error messages related to WebDAV mounting failure appeared when running npm run up.

Here is the current situation. Both the Static File directory and WebDAV File directory are properly placed as shown in the screenshot. We are testing live previews at: http://127.0.0.1:5500/dist/voyager-story.html?mode=edit&root=/files/models/chair/&document=chair.svx.json

For permission issues, we ran ls -l inside the files directory, and here are the results:

total 231008
-rw-r--r--  1 username staff        893 Jul 22  2019 DISCLAIMER.txt
-rw-r--r--  1 username staff       3486 Jul 22  2019 README.txt
-rw-r--r--  1 username staff      16102 Jul 22  2019 TERMS_OF_USE.txt
-rw-r--r--  1 username staff  107204104 Feb 26 12:06 assets.zip
drwxr-xr-x  6 username staff        192 Jul 22  2019 models

From these permissions, is there any change we should make to resolve the issue?

[gjcope]

I'm curious, you said you are able to load models successfully, but the screen shot you shared shows a 404 when attempting to fetch a demo scene. Is this the case?

Sorry, I can't really debug permissions issue on your end as I don't know what your user groups are and what user you are using to launch the app. But I do know that launching the Docker image as a local user with an attached filesystem that has some form of 'admin' rights required will run into 'write' issues as it does not have the permissions to do so. I can't say for sure that is your issue, but that would all be system dependent.

I can say that we have deployed the Docker image on multiple desktop systems without issue. It's generally servers where some of these conflicts come into play. What version of Docker are you using? I can check and make sure there aren't any conflicts there.

Sorry you are experiencing so many issues, hopefully we can figure it out!

[kemco2019]

Hi, @gjcope , we really appreciate your help,

The screenshot you shared shows a 404 when attempting to fetch a demo scene? Is this the case?

We hadn’t noticed that message before, and never seen it in the console. We think it might be indicating an incorrect model directory path. Based on the URL parameters in the error message, it seems like voyager-explorer-dev.html needs to be placed in the root directory, with the models directory also under the root. Actually, after moving the directories, the error message disappeared.

However, this conflicts with the earlier message stating that static files are located in app/dist while model (WebDAV) files are in app/files. Could you clarify the expected directory structure?

Regarding the permission issues, the container runs as the root user by default. We initially overlooked this, and the previous permission checks were done on the host machine. We have confirmed that all files inside the Docker container are owned by root.
Could this be the cause of the 405 error?

What version of Docker are you using?

We are using Docker ver 27.3.1.

[kemco2019]

Hi, @gjcope, thank you for your help,

We want to correct my previous response—our assumption about the incorrect path was entirely a misunderstanding.

After re-examining the request when creating an article, I noticed that the request URL is using the live preview port (5500) instead of the WebDAV port (8000). We believe that this request should be sent to the WebDAV port (8000) —would that be correct?

To verify WebDAV functionality, we tested the server on port 8000 and confirmed that it is properly accepting PUT requests.

However, I’m unsure where to modify the request URL to ensure that requests are sent to the WebDAV port. Could you tell us how to configure this in the Voyager setup?”

Thanks again!

[gjcope]

Hi @kemco2019 ,

Apologies, I should have noticed that myself!

The port for the express server included in the Voyager Docker image can be configured in the .env file (template found here: https://github.com/Smithsonian/dpo-voyager/blob/master/.env.template) as described at the end of the 'prerequisites' section here: https://smithsonian.github.io/dpo-voyager/introduction/installation/ with the default port being 8000.

All asset requests within Voyager will be mapped from the root of the page request. This is important as otherwise we can run into CORS errors. So if your setup is using the default port, you should be accessing it at that port (http://127.0.0.1:8000/dist/voyager-story.html?mode=edit&root=/files/models/chair/&document=chair.svx.json). If you need to access via a different port due to firewall restrictions or something like that, you can change it via the .env file as described aove.

[kemco2019]

Hi @gjcope, thank you for your help,

We have confirmed that the port number in the .env file remains at the default. However, we encountered a 404 error when attempting to preview using the provided URL.

We have no idea of the error because the file should be correctly placed under dist directory.

At present, we issued a curl request to the HTML file to investigate the cause of this error, and the response was as follows:

$ curl -v http://127.0.0.1:8000/dist/voyager-story.html
*   Trying 127.0.0.1:8000...
* Connected to 127.0.0.1 (127.0.0.1) port 8000
> GET /dist/voyager-story.html HTTP/1.1
> Host: 127.0.0.1:8000
> User-Agent: curl/8.7.1
> Accept: */*
> 
* Request completely sent off
< HTTP/1.1 404 Not Found
< DAV: 1,2
< Access-Control-Allow-Origin: *
< Access-Control-Allow-Credentials: true
< Access-Control-Expose-Headers: DAV, content-length, Allow
< MS-Author-Via: DAV
< Server: webdav-server/2.6.2
< WWW-Authenticate: Digest realm="default realm", qop="auth", nonce="d2ac814ffca5d9dea62c0a3dcad6245d", opaque="30547a9536750875b126f68dd4ee2a2b"
< Allow: OPTIONS,MKCOL,LOCK,POST,PUT
< Date: Thu, 06 Mar 2025 11:01:53 GMT
< Connection: keep-alive
< Keep-Alive: timeout=5
< Content-Length: 0
< 
* Connection #0 to host 127.0.0.1 left intact

We thought it unnatural that the dist directory appears to be behaving as a WebDAV server, given that the WebDAV file directory should be the files directory.

[gjcope]

Hi @kemco2019

Take a look at the examples here on how to request the page: https://smithsonian.github.io/dpo-voyager/introduction/demo-assets/

Since the static files are already mapped to /dist, no /dist is required when requesting. Just http://127.0.0.1:8000/voyager-story.html

Best,
Jamie

[kemco2019]

Hi @gjcope ,

Thanks to your guidance, we’re slowly starting to understand what we were doing wrong.

Instead of using the preview provided by voyager-server, we mistakenly placed the files in /var/www/html/ on our remote server and viewed the preview through Apache. We now realize that this was why WebDAV was not working as expected.

Additionally, we specified an incorrect URL because we were trying to access the files through Apache, which led us to deviate from the URL specified in the official guide (https://smithsonian.github.io/dpo-voyager/introduction/demo-assets/).

As for the 409 error, we suspect that it was caused by a conflict between Apache and voyager-server since the files were placed under /var/www/html/.

Thanks to your instructions, we’ve now successfully managed to run Voyager in our local environment. However, since we’re not familiar with Linux too, we’re still unsure where is the best place to deploy Voyager on our remote server and what operations are necessary without causing conflicts like before.

Thank you so much for your continued support!

[gjcope]

@kemco2019 - Great news! I'm glad you were able to get it up and running.

We do have a server that is running Apache and the Voyager Docker container concurrently. The only things I'm aware of that we had to do were:

• Make sure Voyager wasn't running on a port reserved for something else with the Apache deployment
• Make sure there were no firewall rules in Apache limiting the traffic being passed through to Docker
• Make sure WebDAV is enabled

I hope this is helpful!

[kemco2019]

Hi, @gjcope,

Thank you, I feel assured that you are doing well in the same environment. It looks the location of the Voyager folder does not seem to be an issue.

We do have a server that is running Apache and the Voyager Docker container concurrently.

Is it correct to assume that Apache is configured as a reverse proxy, forwarding requests to Voyager’s port 8000?

Make sure there were no firewall rules in Apache limiting the traffic being passed through to Docker.

Would opening port 8000 using ufw be sufficient?

[gjcope]

Hey @kemco2019 - unfortunately I didn't set up that server so I'm unsure what steps were taken, but I don't believe there was much custom configuration done.

If you can list a fresh set of steps that are still causing an error (409 or otherwise) with your setup and the things pointing to the correct location/port as discussed previously, I'll see if I can get some advice on what might be going wrong.

[kemco2019]

Hi, @gjcope,

Thanks for getting back to me! I appreciate your support throughout this.

It turns out that, since the web server functionality was already included, simply placing the project folder in the home on the Linux machine was enough to avoid conflict with Apache. In our case, no firewall configuration was needed and eventually succeeded to build the server.

Thanks again for your help!