MUSA 5500 — Geospatial Data Science in Python

Course website for MUSA 5500 at the University of Pennsylvania. It is a static React application built with Vite. Course notebooks, assignments, and other downloads are stored in public/.

Requirements

• Node.js 20 or newer
• npm (included with Node.js)
• Git

Start the website locally

git clone https://github.com/xiaojianggis/MUSA-5500-Geospatial-Data-Science-Python.git
cd MUSA-5500-Geospatial-Data-Science-Python
npm ci
npm run dev

Vite prints the local URL, normally http://localhost:5173/MUSA-5500-Geospatial-Data-Science-Python/. Changes in src/ appear automatically. Files in public/ are copied without modification.

To test from another device on the same network, use npm run dev -- --host. Do not expose the development server directly to the public internet.

Render a notebook as HTML

The lecture notebooks and their rendered HTML files live together under public/labs/. They are rendered with Quarto. Check that Quarto is installed with:

quarto --version

From the repository root, render a notebook with:

quarto render public/labs/week-9-web-scraping/lecture-9A.ipynb --to html

Preview while editing

Open the notebook in JupyterLab (or VS Code), then in a second terminal run:

quarto preview public/labs/week-9-web-scraping/lecture-9A.ipynb --to html

Quarto opens a local preview URL and refreshes it after you save the notebook. Use the saved cell outputs for a fast preview. If you also need Quarto to run every cell before rendering, add --execute:

quarto preview public/labs/week-9-web-scraping/lecture-9A.ipynb --to html --execute

Replace the example path with the notebook you want to update. Quarto writes the HTML beside the notebook, so the example creates or replaces:

public/labs/week-9-web-scraping/lecture-9A.html

The command uses the notebook's saved cell outputs. To execute every cell before rendering, use:

quarto render public/labs/week-9-web-scraping/lecture-9A.ipynb --to html --execute

Use --execute only when the notebook's Python environment and required data are available. After rendering, make sure the corresponding entry in src/pages/Schedule.jsx has an href pointing to the HTML file. Then run npm run dev to check the lecture link locally. Commit the notebook, generated HTML, any generated <notebook-name>_files/ directory, and the schedule change.

Check and build

npm run lint
npm run build

The production files are created in dist/. To preview them locally, run:

npm run preview

Publish with GitHub Pages

The site is published automatically through GitHub Pages whenever changes are pushed to the main branch. The workflow is defined in .github/workflows/deploy.yml.

For the first deployment, enable GitHub Pages in the repository settings:

1. Go to Settings > Pages.
2. Under Build and deployment, select GitHub Actions as the source.
3. Push your changes to main and wait for the Deploy (Vite) to GitHub Pages workflow to finish.

The Vite base path in vite.config.js is set for this repository's GitHub Pages URL. If the repository name changes, update that base path to match the new name.

Course outline

The course covers Python fundamentals, exploratory analysis and visualization, Pandas and GeoPandas, spatial mapping, raster operations, spatial analysis, network analysis, web scraping and APIs, web publishing, clustering, machine learning, and final project presentations. Labs and assignments are available through the website and under public/.