NASA EPIC Image Retriever

This is a Symfony console command that fetches images from the NASA EPIC (Earth Polychromatic Imaging Camera) API for a given date and stores them in a specified target folder.

Prerequisites

• PHP 7.4 or higher
• Composer

Installation

1. Clone the repository or download the source code.
2. Navigate to the project directory.
3. Install the dependencies using Composer:

composer install

Usage

To fetch NASA EPIC images, run the following command:

php bin/console app:fetch-nasa-epic-images [target-folder] [date]

• target-folder (required): The path to the folder where the images will be stored.

• date (optional): The date for which to fetch images in the format YYYY-MM-DD. If not provided, the command will fetch images for the last available date.

Example:

php bin/console app:fetch-nasa-epic-images /path/to/target/folder 2024-06-11

This command will fetch NASA EPIC images for the date 2024-06-11 and store them in the /path/to/target/folder/2024-06-11 directory.

How it Works

1. The command retrieves the last available date from the NASA EPIC API if the date argument is not provided.
2. It creates a subfolder within the target-folder using the provided date.
3. The command fetches the image metadata for the given date from the NASA EPIC API.
4. For each image in the metadata, it constructs the correct URL to download the actual image file.
5. The images are downloaded and saved in the dateFolder.

Dependencies

This command uses the following Symfony components:

• symfony/console: For creating the console command.
• symfony/http-client: For making HTTP requests to the NASA EPIC API.

Configuration

The NASA EPIC API requires an API key to access the data. The API key should be stored as an environment variable named NASA_EPIC_API_KEY. You can set this variable in the .env file in the root directory of your project.

To set the API key, open the .env file and add the following line, replacing YOUR_API_KEY with your actual NASA EPIC API key:

To Do's

• Add Guzzle for a better perfomance while downloading the images
• Add parallel downloads
• Add throttling
• Add enhanced (actual only natural)

Go Version

A more simplier approach in Golang is uploaded to this repository

License

This project is licensed under the MIT License.

Feel free to modify or expand this documentation based on your project's specific requirements or additional features you might have implemented.