Rowboat

An AI-powered data explorer for public astronomy datasets. Import real data (starting with confirmed exoplanets from NASA's Exoplanet Archive), then ask natural-language questions about it and get back structured answers and visualizations.

• Ruby on Rails 8.1
• PostgreSQL
• RSpec for testing
• Deployed on AWS (ECS Fargate, RDS, ALB) via Terraform
• CI/CD via GitHub Actions

• Import datasets from public APIs (NASA Exoplanet Archive to start, Near Earth Object data planned next)
• Flexible schema per dataset, no migration needed to add a new data source
• Ask questions about a dataset in plain English (in progress)

Requirements: Docker, Docker Compose.

docker compose up

The app will be available at localhost:3000.

If running outside Docker, you'll also need:

sudo apt install -y libpq-dev libvips

bundle exec rspec

bin/rails datasets:import_exoplanets

Pulls live data from NASA's Exoplanet Archive and seeds it into the database.

Infrastructure is defined in terraform/. The app deploys automatically to AWS via GitHub Actions on merge to main, after CI passes.

cd terraform
terraform apply