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Set up the Africam connection

This tutorial walks you through connecting one or more EarthRanger sites to Africam in the Gundi portal, so that new wildlife sighting reports get an Africam gallery link attached automatically — within about a minute of being reported.

Everything here is point-and-click in the Gundi portal. You do not need to write code or call APIs.

← Overview

Prerequisites

You need Where it comes from
A Gundi portal account in your organisation gundiservice.org
An EarthRanger site and an API token for it Your EarthRanger admin
An Africam API bearer token The Africam team

The EarthRanger token must be allowed to read and update events — the runner both fetches events and patches the gallery URL back onto them.

Step 1 — Create the EarthRanger integration

In the Gundi portal, create (or reuse) an EarthRanger integration for your site:

  1. Set its base URL to the site, e.g. https://yoursite.pamdas.org.
  2. In its Authentication action, set the token to your EarthRanger API token.

The Africam runner reads exactly these two values at runtime — if the token is missing here, every run fails with "No auth configuration found" (see Troubleshooting).

Step 2 — Create the connection

Create a new connection with:

  • Provider: an integration of type Africam (this runner).
  • Destination(s): the EarthRanger integration(s) from Step 1. Every EarthRanger destination you add is processed on every run, each with its own bookkeeping — you can fan one Africam configuration out to several sites.

Step 3 — Configure the process_new_events action

Open the Africam integration's Process New Events action and fill in:

  1. Africam API Token — the bearer token from the Africam team.
  2. Event Types — the EarthRanger event-type slugs to forward. The default is wildlife_sighting. Slugs must exist on the EarthRanger site(s); a typo here shows up as a warning in the Activity Log rather than an error.
  3. Lookback Hours — how far back the first run reaches (default 1, max 168). After the first run the action always continues from where it left off.
  4. Leave Africam API URL and Africam Event URL Template at their defaults unless the Africam team tells you otherwise.

Save the configuration. The action runs automatically every minute — there is nothing to start.

Step 4 — Verify the first run

Open the connection's Activity Log in the Gundi portal. Within a couple of minutes you should see:

  • "Fetching EarthRanger events from https://yoursite.pamdas.org updated since …" — one such line per EarthRanger site on the connection, then
  • "Forwarded N event(s) to Africam (0 error(s))" — a single summary for the run, aggregated across all of the connection's sites.

If instead you see a warning like "Configured event type(s) not found …", one of your event-type slugs doesn't exist on that site — see Troubleshooting.

Report (or update) an event of a configured type on the EarthRanger site, wait a minute, then open the event in EarthRanger. Its details should now contain an africam_event_url field, e.g.:

https://ranger-media.africam.com/gallery/e0577b3a-0542-4af4-b1df-b23a9f1583ea

Open it — you should land on the Africam gallery for that event. That's the whole pipeline working end-to-end.

Next

  • Configuration — what each setting does, and how the incremental fetch window works.
  • Troubleshooting — if any step above didn't look like this.