I finally had a chance to improve the Viewmaster app, adding the following features (version v0.2.1, unless marked):

• Movies include (optional) plot, actor(s), director(s), and poster with the help of IMDB info.
• Persisting the display mode, whether details are seen, and whether Laser Discs are shown.
• Improved the display of movie information (and show more info, when looking at detailed info).
• Command line utility to update movies quickly, with IMDB information.
• Updated to newer Poetry version for dependency management.
• Local Development of Django app.
• v0.2.2: Ability to manually enter IMDB ID during movie lookup for adding/editing movies.
• v0.2.2: Python script to create bash script for local development use.
• v0.2.2: Miscellaneous tweaks.
• v0.2.3: Use a pull-down for display mode instead of buttons.
• v0.2.3: Allow search by title, actors, directors, or plot.

 

Details On Changes

Here are the details of all the things that were changed in the app.

IMDB Info

By far, the biggest change was using the OMDB.com API to obtain info on the move. You can search by full/partial title, and get a list of media (movies, games, TV series, etc). Then, using the movie ID provided, you can get plot, actor(s), director(s), release date, genres, MPAA rating, duration, URL link to cover (poster), review ratings, and more.

The database was modified to add additional, optional, fields for the plot, actor(s) director(s), movie ID, and poster URL link.

When adding a new movie, you will first see a form to enter a partial title for the movie. A search is done, and the candidate movies are shown. Clicking on an entry will select and load the IMDB details into the form for completing the addition. The If there is no match in IMDB, or the choices are not correct, you can click the “Skip” button to continue without any IMDB info filled out.

With IMDB info, besides plot, actors, and directors, the release date, MPAA rating, and duration will be filled out. For the genre selection, the pull down list will show the entries that the IMDB had first, and then all the rest of the available genres.

When editing a movie, if there already is IMDB info, it will go directly to the edit form. If there is no IMDB info, the title will be used to do a search and the candidate movies will be shown. Like adding, you can select one, or click “Skip” to continue without IMDB info.

If the release year, rating, or duration in the IMDB database differ from what you had already, the values will be shown in RED (you can look at the log to see what the differences are). In v0.2.2, the old values are shown below the entry field, so that you can see the change. You can keep the change, or enter the original value into the field. For the genre selection, the pull down list will show the entries that the IMDB had first, and then all the rest, with your existing genre selection as the chosen one.

v0.2.2: When viewing the results of an IMDB lookup on movie title during add/edit operations, besides selecting one of the candidates, you can enter the IMDB ID (available in the URL, when looking at movie info at https://www.imdb.com/). This ID starts with the letters “tt” and then has a number. Once, selected, the add/edit movie form will be populated with that information.

Persisting Display Info

Now, when a display mode is selected (e.g. alpha, genre, date,…), this setting will persist, even after doing adds, edits, or searching.

Likewise, if you select to show Laser Disc info, and/or details for movies, this setting will persist, until you change the setting and select a mode.

Improved Movie List

For the list of movies, when you hover over a movie, it will be highlighted, and you can click anywhere on the row to select the item.

The summary view is similar to what was there before, but the detail view now has the cover displayed along with multi-line output showing the plot, actors, and directors info.

Importing IMDB Info

It’s a slow process editing all the movies to select IMDB info to be imported. So, a command line utility was created that will go through each movie that does not have IMDB info, show the movie title, release date, rating and duration, and then a list of candidates.

You can skip the candidates, or select one by number, for which it will show you the title, release date, rating, duration, IMDB ID, plot, actors, and directors. For the release date, rating, and duration it provides an indication of whether the info matches (and if not, what was different). You can confirm the choice or go back to select another candidate.

On each prompt, the default choice is shown in square brackets. For candidate selection, that is usually “0” (skip), and for the confirmation it is “S” (save). You can exit the process at several places, and each time this tool is run, it will continue with any movies missing IMDB info.

Poetry Update

As some time has passed, Poetry has gone through updates, and some made significant changes to the config files used, so I changed things up, and used this time to update versions of packages used.

Local Development

The whole point of the Viewmaster project work I initially did, was to port it from a Docker container to run under Kubernetes. However, during development work, it is nice to just tweak the app and be able to locally see the effects on your development machine, rather than re-building, pushing, restarting the pod.

I decided that I would have the locally run app use the “production” database, rather than creating a Postgres server on my Mac to provide a test database. Riskier, but I also setup a script to make easy backups of the database.

Miscellaneous Tweaks

For v0.2.2, added a “show-pod-log” script to allow easy viewing of the Viewmaster pod log in Kubernetes. There already are scripts to exec into the app and database pods. As mentioned below, there is a Python script that will create the dev-setup.bash script used for local development.

Display Mode

For v0.2.3, the display mode is a single pull-down menu, instead of a set of buttons (that are mutually exclusive). You can also change the check boxes, and then re-select the same mode, and the display will be refreshed.

Enhanced Search

For v0.2.3, a select pull-down was added to the search field so that the search can be relative to the title, actors, directors, or plot. When the search input is entered or magnifying glass clicked, the display will show the (case-insensitive) results.

 

How To Use New Version

I (finally) created a tag on the Github repo, called V0.1.2 for the original version, and then created a new tag v0.2.1 for the latest version (I should have done more tags along the way). In any case, this section will describe how update the existing app under Kubernetes, how to run the app locally, and how to setup to use the command line IMDB importing tool.

Backup First!

Before starting this venture, it’s a good idea to backup the database for Viewmaster. The new version has a script to help access the database pod, and you can then run the backup command, provide the password, exit, and then move the database export to your computer. Here are the steps:

cd ~/workspace/kubernetes/viewmaster
./exec-into-db-pod
pg_dump -U viewmasterer -W -F t viewmasterdb > viewmasterdb.tar
[enter password]
exit

./move-backup

This will rename the file with the date/time, so you have a copy of the database, in case things go awry.

Updating to v0.2.3

This is assuming you have an installation of the original Viewmaster app running. If you’re starting from scratch, you need to follow the instructions from the original article, and make a few changes, as described here, to work with the latest. Additional values for secrets, using the newer version are most of the differences.

The first step to update is to move to the GIT repo for the app (cloned from https://github.com/pmichali/viewmaster.git) and pull the latest code by checking out the tag v0.2.3.

You should already have a deploy/viewmaster-secrets.env file from the previous version. Use deploy/viewmaster-secrets.env.template to see the new fields. Currently, that is just the OMDB_API_KEY. To set that value, go to https://www.omdbapi.com/ and click on the API tab. Enter your email address and a free API key will be emailed to you. This allows 1,000 requests per day. If you want, you can become a patron member for unlimited access. Place this value in the viewmaster-secrets.env file. You need to replace the existing secret with this new one:

cd ~/workspace/kubernetes/viewmaster/deploy
kubectl delete secret -n viewmaster viewmaster-secrets

kubectl create secret generic viewmaster-secrets -n viewmaster \
        --from-env-file=viewmaster-secrets.env

Next, you need to build and push this version of the app for Kubernetes (Note: on a Mac, you need to have Docker desktop running):

cd ~/workspace/kubernetes/viewmaster
docker buildx build . -t YOUR_DOCKER_ID/viewmaster-app:v0.2.3
docker push YOUR_DOCKER_ID/viewmaster-app:v0.2.3

Deploy the app again, so that it deletes the old pod, downloads the v0.2.3 pod, and runs it:

kubectl apply -d deploy/django.yaml

Check to make sure the pod comes up and check the log to make sure that Django collected the static files, and that the database migrations occurred to create all the new fields. You can use the show-pod-log script to check the log.

From the web site, you should see the new version number at the top of the movie list page, and a different look. Verify that you can add movies, edit movies, persist mode settings, and that there are searches (for add) and lookups (for edit) of movies in the IMDB.

Running Locally

Instead of going through long build/push/delete cycles to modify the app, it is nice to be able to run Django locally on your computer. Note: that I chose to use the production database, so I have live data to use. One could choose to spin up a Postgres server and have a dummy database, if desired. I’ll leave that as an exercise for the reader.

The Postgres database running in the kubernetes cluster does not have an externally visible IP and the viewmaster-postgres.viewmaster.svc.cluster.local domain name is not known from my laptop. To remedy this, we must expose an IP for the database pod. This can be done with:

kubectl expose service viewmaster-postgres -n viewmaster --port=5432 --target-port=5432 --name=viewmaster-postgres-dev --type=LoadBalancer

Do a “kubectl get svc -n viewmaster viewmaster-postgres-dev” and note the external IP for the service. Then, from the top of the tree, run:

python3 make-dev-setup-script.py EXTERNAL-IP-FOR-DBASE

This will create the file movie_library/dev-setup.bash, which can be sourced to setup an environment like what the Django app would see in a Kubernetes pod. Note: it does some special tweaks to the SECRET_KEY and POSTGRES_PASSWORD so that they can be used in bash export commands.

The Django server can now be run locally:

cd ~/workspace/kubernetes/viewmaster/movie_library
source dev-setup.bash
python3 manage.py runserver

You should be able to access the app from your browser at http://127.0.0.1:8000. You can also do “collectstatic”, “makemigrations”, “migrate”, “dbshell”, and other commands.

Using the IMDB importer

I created a command line app that will search the viewmaster database, collecting movies without an IMDB ID, and show a count of movies that need processing. For each movie, the IMDB database is searched with the title, and matching candidates are shown, allowing one to be selected for updating the viewmaster info. When done (or exiting) it will tell you how many movies have been processed.

To run the script, the same dev-setup.bash script must be sourced, so that environment variables are obtained, and then the python script can be run:

cd ~/workspace/kubernetes/viewmaster/movie_library
source dev-setup.bash
python3 viewmaster/imdb_import.py

Here is some sample execution:

Have 413 movies to process

Movie: 'Fallen ' (175)
Release: 1998 Rating: R Duration: 02:05:00


0) SKIP SELECTION FOR THIS MOVIE

Enter choice 0,x [0]:
Skipping movie

Movie: 'Fury' (200)
Release: 2014 Rating: R Duration: 02:15:00


0) SKIP SELECTION FOR THIS MOVIE
1) 2015 Mad Max: Fury Road (movie)
2) 2014 Fury (movie)
3) 2023 Shazam! Fury of the Gods (movie)
4) 2015 Kung Fury (movie)
5) 2007 Balls of Fury (movie)
6) 1972 Fist of Fury (movie)
7) 2014 Cuban Fury (movie)
8) 1989 Blind Fury (movie)
9) 1978 The Fury (movie)
10) 1936 Fury (movie)

Enter choice 0-10,x [0]: 2

TITLE: Fury
RELEASED: 2014 ✅
RATING: R ✅
DURATION: 02:14 ❌ (database had 02:15)
IMDB ID: tt2713180
A grizzled tank commander makes tough decisions as he and his crew fight their way across Germany in April, 1945.
ACTORS: Brad Pitt, Shia LaBeouf, Logan Lerman
DIRECTORS: David Ayer

Enter choice Save, Back, Ignore, eXit[S]:

Saved updates to movie

On the first movie, “Fallen”, the viewmaster database had “Fallen ” and with the extra space, it could not find the movie. The solution there, is to use the the web version, edit the movie, and correct the movie title so that a subsequent edit will allow the lookup.

On the second movie, there were numerous matches to “Fury”. I picked the second one (it usually is the first one), and then selected the default value in square brackets (save). You can see that IMDB had a slightly different duration.

v0.2.2: With this version, in addition to the candidates being listed, there is an additional selection, that allows you to manually enter the IMDB ID. If done, it will then show details of that selection, allowing you to save, ignore, got back, or exit. Here is an example:

Movie: 'MGM Sampler Disk' (365)
Release: 1993 Rating: NR Duration: 00:00:00


0) SKIP SELECTION FOR THIS MOVIE
1) Manually enter movie ID

Enter choice 0-1,x [0]: 1
Enter IMDB ID: tt0211493

TITLE: MGM/UA Home Video Laserdisc Sampler
RELEASED: 1992 ❌ (database had 1993)
RATING: NR ✅
2025-03-08T09:35:43 [WARNING ] Unable to parse time string 'N/A'
DURATION: 00:00 ✅
IMDB ID: tt0211493
N/A
ACTORS: N/A
DIRECTORS: N/A

 

Things To Be Aware Of

If you already have the original app installed, you’ll need to delete and re-add the K8s secrets, as there are more values being stored.

If you have existing movies in the database, there can be some challenges finding them in IMDB. I had a few titles misspelled, so they could not be matched. I would typically check the title and edit the movie to match what is shown in IMDB, and then edit the movie again so that the lookup would succeed.

With free access to OMDB, you are limited to 1,000 requests a day. Not a problem for this app, where we just need to go through the movies once, to obtain the info.

There were quite a few cases where the duration in IMDB database, was slightly different than what I had entered for the movie (from the back cover of the movie box).

There were some funky titles, like “Alien 3”, which has a superscript three character (I cut and pasted it from a test run doing an add movie operation, searching for “Alien”.

I had one case, of an old movie, that was not in IMDB.

I had another case of a title that I could not find a match for that year, but when visiting https://www.imdb.com, I could find the movie version of interest. For v0.2.2, I used the manual ID entry to resolve.

Lastly, I hit one case where a six disk TV series resolved to a single IMDB entry. To be able to integrate the IMDB info I had to take these steps for each of the “season” disks:

1. Note the release year and duration.
2. Rename the title to just have the show name, and not any season info.
3. Edit again, so that the IMDB data can be found.
   1. Change the title back to include the season indication.
   2. Change the duration to what was there before (from the box cover).
   3. Set the release date for that season
4. Save the movie.

In IMDB it had the release as 2010-2015, but the app can only extract a single date for a movie, so it would always show 2010. The duration was totally wrong in IMDB.

 

What’s Left To Do

There are a few more things that I’d like to do (maybe)…

• Maybe save the movie cover (poster), instead of having to access the URL for image.
• Decide if I want to enable remote access, and if so, maybe add OTP 2FA.
• Show admin link, if user has admin privileges.