eScriptorium / htr2hpc

eScriptorium is an open-source handwritten text recognition (HTR) application. CDH runs a customized instance that integrates with Princeton’s HPC clusters via the htr2hpc package.

• eScriptorium software: https://gitlab.com/scripta/escriptorium

• htr2hpc software: https://github.com/Princeton-CDH/htr2hpc

Related playbooks

• The eScriptorium application can be deployed to staging or production with the escriptorium playbook. Staging is the default; pass -e runtime_env=production for production.

• To update only the htr2hpc package without a full redeploy, use the reinstall-htr2hpc tag (see below).

Updating htr2hpc

The full deploy playbook does not reinstall the htr2hpc Python package by default — it only runs when eScriptorium itself is being redeployed. To update htr2hpc to a new branch or release or to ensure changes on an existing branch are installed, use the reinstall-htr2hpc tag:

ansible-playbook playbooks/escriptorium.yml -t reinstall-htr2hpc

This tag uninstalls the current htr2hpc package and reinstalls the version specified by htr2hpc_gitref (defaults to main for production environment). To deploy a specific branch or tag, override the variable:

ansible-playbook playbooks/escriptorium.yml -t reinstall-htr2hpc -e htr2hpc_gitref=0.6.0

After reinstalling, the task restarts nginx, Celery, and Django Channels to pick up the new code. Use this tag whenever a new htr2hpc release has been published and needs to be deployed — it is not needed for other playbook changes.