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Before the tutorials: prerequisites

At a glance

One-time setup the tutorials silently assume: a running TRAPPER instance, an activated account, and — for any tutorial that uploads data — an installed and configured trapper-tools.

1. A running TRAPPER instance

If you don't have one, follow Get a localhost stack running — it stands up the whole ecosystem (Expert, AI Manager, Citizen Science frontend, and optionally the AI Worker) via trapper-setup and Docker.

2. An activated account

Register through the instance's sign-up page (or have an admin create the account), then have an admin activate it and grant project roles — see Users & roles. On a fresh localhost stack, the setup wizard's superuser account works out of the box.

3. trapper-tools installed

The upload steps in the tutorials use trapper-tools, a separate CLI — it is not part of the TRAPPER server stack, so install it on the machine that holds your media files.

It needs FFmpeg and ExifTool on PATH:

# Ubuntu/Debian
sudo apt install ffmpeg libimage-exiftool-perl

Then install the CLI itself (any Python ≥3.10 environment; uv shown, plain pip works the same way):

uv pip install "git+https://gitlab.com/trapper-project/trapper-tools.git"

Check the tools are found:

trapper-tools helpers test-tools

4. trapper-tools configured

Every trapper-tools command that talks to a server (upload, pipeline, connection tests) needs a configured project connection. Create one:

trapper-tools config init myproject

This writes ~/.trapper-tools/myproject.toml and sets it active. Edit the GENERAL section with your server URL and credentials:

[GENERAL]
host = "https://your-trapper-host"   # e.g. http://localhost:8000 on a localhost stack
login = "you@example.org"            # your TRAPPER account email
password = "..."
project_id = 1                       # the Research Project ID you'll upload into

project_id refers to a Research Project that must already exist — the first-project tutorial creates it in step 1, so it's fine to leave the placeholder until then and come back.

Verify the connection:

trapper-tools helpers test-connection

Local-only commands (helpers template, convert, package) work without a configured connection — only upload/trigger steps need it.

Next steps