Getting Started

You have two options for creating your Lookout site: start from a blank template, or customize one of our existing demos. You’ll need Git and Python installed on your machine.

Installation

Open a terminal, navigate to the directory where you want to store Lookout, and run:

git clone git@github.com:fathominfo/lookout-template.git lookout
cd lookout

This will create a folder called lookout containing the template project files.

What if I don't have Git installed? If you don't have Git installed on your computer, you can download Lookout as a .zip file.
  1. Go to the Lookout template repository on GitHub.
  2. Click the green Code button near the top right of the page.
  3. Select Download ZIP.
  4. Once downloaded, unzip the file. You can move the resulting folder to wherever you'd like to store the project.

Run the blank template site:

./server.tool  # for Mac users; Windows users should run this script with Python

You’ll be working in the site and connectors directories to modify your site.

View the Demo Sites

We have also provided several demo sites, each showcasing different Lookout capabilities, that you can reference and customize. Their source configurations are available in the public Lookout demos repo, and you can see what they look like when deployed at the links below:

Single pathogen examples:

  1. covid (GitHub)
  2. h5n1 (GitHub)
  3. resp (GitHub)

Multi pathogen examples:

  1. nigeria-sim (GitHub)
  2. sormas (GitHub)
  3. us-sim (GitHub)

To run a site locally in order to build off of or customize it, run:

git clone git@github.com:fathominfo/lookout-demos.git lookout-demos  # clone the repo
cd lookout-demos  # cd into the repo
cd single-pathogen/basic  # cd into whichever demo you want to run
./server.tool  # for Mac users; Windows users should run this script with Python

You should now have a working demo for Lookout!

To get familiar with Lookout’s capabilities, try to:

  1. Explore cases through time by scrubbing through the timeline in the top bar
  2. View cases for specific geographic areas with the geography selector in the top bar
  3. Filter cases by demographic by interacting with any chart

Next steps

Whether you’re starting from the blank template or building off of a demo site, you can now begin customizing your Lookout instance. This will consist of three main steps: configuring your site’s high-level details in config.json, importing your data into record.json, and specifying your charts and visual layout in layout.json. Together, these three json file formats are all that are required to configure a Lookout site.

The first step is to Configure Your Site.