Working with the Datastore¶
The input data that PUDL processes comes from a variety of US government agencies. However, these agencies typically make the data available on their websites or via FTP without planning for programmatic access. To ensure reproducible, programmatic access, we periodically archive the input files on the Zenodo research archiving service maintained by CERN. (See our pudl-archiver repository on GitHub for more information.)
When PUDL needs a data resource, it will attempt to automatically retrieve it from Zenodo and store it locally in a file hierarchy organized by dataset and the versioned DOI of the corresponding Zenodo deposition.
The pudl_datastore
script can also be used to pre-download the raw input data in
bulk. It uses the routines defined in the pudl.workspace.datastore
module. For
details on what data is available, for what time periods, and how much of it there
is, see the PUDL Data Sources. At present the pudl_datastore
script
downloads the entire collection of data available for each dataset. For the FERC Form
1 and EPA CEMS datasets, this is several gigabytes.
For example, to download the full EIA Form 860 – Annual Electric Generator Report dataset (covering 2001-present) you would use:
$ pudl_datastore --dataset eia860
For more detailed usage information, see:
$ pudl_datastore --help
The downloaded data will be used by the script to populate a datastore under
your $PUDL_INPUT
directory, organized by data source, form, and DOI:
data/censusdp1tract/
data/eia860/
data/eia860m/
data/eia861/
data/eia923/
data/epacems/
data/ferc1/
data/ferc2/
data/ferc60/
data/ferc714/
data/phmsagas/
If the download fails to complete successfully, the script can be run repeatedly until all the files are downloaded. It will not try and re-download data which is already present locally.
Adding a new Dataset to the Datastore¶
We maintain a tool at pudl-archiver that manages the archival and versioning of datasets. See the documentation for information on adding datasets to the datastore.
Tell PUDL about the archive¶
Once you have used pudl-archiver to prepare a Zenodo archive as above, you
can make the PUDL Datastore aware of it by updating the appropriate DOI in
pudl.workspace.datastore.ZenodoDoiSettings
. DOIs can refer to resources from
the Zenodo sandbox server for archives that are still
in testing or development (sandbox DOIs have a prefix of 10.5072
), or the
Zenodo production server server if the archive is ready for
public use (production DOIs have a prefix of 10.5281
).