UPDATE FROM MABULA
I have had a very rough 2 months unfortunately health wise. I was struck 3x in a row with bacterial infections. The second infection occurred after a routine hospital checkup and I became very sick. I had to rest and take a lot of antibiotics. Once I was recovering and restarting work 1 month ago, I again became sick. The infection was not yet gone, so even more antibiotics and rest was needed. Needless to say, it took a lot of my energy and I needed a lot of rest.
Finally, the infection is really gone and my energy is coming back step-by-step now and I have started work again. I am terribly sorry to have kept you waiting for support. I will address all outstanding questions and e-mails step-by step and will be on the forum daily from today.
APP 2.0.0-beta47 will come soon as well, a lot of work was already completed before I became very ill, so the release is also nearly ready for you. Beta47 will be much faster actually. Many workflows will be more than 2x faster, mosaics can even be 10x faster than before because registration really received a major boost... all compared to beta46. Before I release it, I will make sure that everything is working properly and then I will release it.
Automating APP workflow with n8n/scripts: seeking solutions
Hello APP community,
I'm looking to automate my astrophotography processing workflow with Astro Pixel Processor and would like to share my thoughts and get your suggestions.
Context
I have a folder structure organized as follows:
- Main folder:
Astro - Image type subfolders:
Lights,Flats,Darks,Bias - Organized by session date:
[Type]/[Session_Date]/[Filter]/
I want to automate the entire processing workflow, from initial stacking to final integration.
What I've explored so far
I've started working with n8n (a node.js-based automation tool) to create a workflow that:
- Detects new acquisition sessions
- Prepares destination folders for results
- Launches APP with appropriate configurations
- Processes different types of images (calibration, stacking, etc.)
Questions and challenges
- Command line options: Does APP support any command line options to directly load .apdx profiles or execute specific operations?
- API automation: Is there an accessible or planned API that would allow direct interaction with APP from a script or tool like n8n?
- Profile loading: How can I automatically load .apdx profiles for different image types (lights, flats, etc.)?
- Folder monitoring: Is the folder monitoring feature mentioned in other discussions available? How can it be configured?
- Alternative solutions: Have you implemented other automation solutions with APP (AutoIt, PowerShell, shell scripts, etc.)?
My current approach
At the moment, I need to manually launch APP and load profiles manually, but I'd like to automate further. I've created an n8n workflow that:
- Prepares source/destination folders
- Launches APP
- Guides me through the necessary manual steps
If any of you have developed effective automation solutions with APP, I would be very interested to learn about your approach!
Thanks in advance for your advice and suggestions.
Kind regards, Thibaud
Hi Thibaud @thibaud,
Thank you very much for your question and welcome to the forum !
Currently, we have no support at all for any API or commandline options We can of course make that happen going forward, but we have other priorities first.
APP 2.0 stable will feature the new functionality of save/load complete projects and that needs to be finished first before we can work on other new features as you can understand. I think this new feature addresses the profile loading but then with APP project files.
We realize that some APP users want to automate things and we are perfectly willing to make that happen going forward. It is on our ToDo list and we need to do some modifications in our code to make that happen in a smart and reliable way.
So in the last 2 weeks, I have worked actually intensively to restructure our code/project to make it fully modular. This in term will help us greatly to make an API, make additional tools like a quick FITS viewer/Blink tool and of course commandline interface, even running APP headless. I am glad to announce that this work was completely 2 days ago as well, so the project structure is fully ready now to work on these things going forward 😉 I hope that at least gives you an indication that we are aware of automating workflows and making that happen with APP going forward.
Please let me know if you have additional questions or feedback.
Mabula
Hi Mabula,
Thank you very much for your detailed response.
It’s really encouraging to hear that the codebase has now been fully restructured and that features like a command-line interface, API access, and headless mode are part of your roadmap. This opens up great possibilities for automation, especially for advanced or semi-professional astrophotography workflows.
In the meantime, I’ll continue exploring semi-automated solutions using tools like n8n to manage tasks such as folder preparation, app launching, and file organization — even if some manual steps are still required for now.
I do have a few follow-up questions that could help refine my setup and prepare for future integration with APP:
Project save/load feature in APP 2.0
Will the upcoming project save/load feature in APP 2.0 include all calibration, stacking, and integration settings — including relative folder paths?
Will it be possible to reload a project and re-run a process with minimal manual input (e.g., drag & drop, or double-click a project file)?
Folder monitoring
Is a “watch folder” functionality planned or considered — allowing APP to automatically detect new sessions and trigger actions accordingly?
Beta access or early testing
Will it be possible to test the new features (project loading, future CLI, etc.) ahead of the stable 2.0 release — either through a public beta or a closed testing programe
Again, thank you for your work and for considering automation as a future enhancement. I'm very much looking forward to seeing these features evolve!
Best regards,
Thibaud
Hi Thibaud, @thibaud
Project save/load feature in APP 2.0
Will the upcoming project save/load feature in APP 2.0 include all calibration, stacking, and integration settings — including relative folder paths?
Will it be possible to reload a project and re-run a process with minimal manual input (e.g., drag & drop, or double-click a project file)?
Yes, to both of those.
Folder monitoring
Is a “watch folder” functionality planned or considered — allowing APP to automatically detect new sessions and trigger actions accordingly?
Yes it is.
Beta access or early testing
Will it be possible to test the new features (project loading, future CLI, etc.) ahead of the stable 2.0 release — either through a public beta or a closed testing programe
Again, thank you for your work and for considering automation as a future enhancement. I'm very much looking forward to seeing these features evolve!
As soon as testing can be done, we will provide any beta on the downloads page : www.astropixelprocessor.com/downloads/
If we need a special beta group to test things we will let everyone know, but most likely, everyone can try and test it.
Hope that answers your questions regarding this?
Mabula
