Ukraine Firearm Knowledge Portal
The Ukraine Firearm Knowledge Portal is a web‑based dashboard that lets anyone explore information about firearms that appear in Ukrainian social‑media posts. It’s built with the R /Shiny framework and runs in the cloud, so you can reach it from any browser without installing software.
What you see when you open the dashboard.
Map of Ukraine – Each region (oblast) shows the two most‑mentioned firearm items with coloured circles. Bigger circles mean the item is mentioned more often.
Key numbers (metrics) – Quick stats such as the most recent posting date, total number of posts, and total mentions.
Charts – Over‑time bar chart shows how many posts mention each item month by month. Category chart displays the total counts for each firearm type.
Data table – A searchable, scrollable list of every post, with coloured “badge” labels, a thumbnail of the associated screenshot, and a link to the original source (Facebook, Telegram, etc.).
Language switch – Buttons let you toggle all labels, legends and text between English and Ukrainian.
All of these elements react instantly when you change the filters (items, regions, date range). There’s no “Apply” button; the dashboard updates automatically, with a short pause to avoid overwhelming the server.
How the data get there
Source material – Social‑media posts are collected in Google Drive as CSV files.
Database – Those CSVs are loaded into a lightweight DuckDB database that lives on the server. DuckDB does the heavy lifting (splitting multi‑value fields, grouping by month, etc.) so the R code only pulls the exact slice you need.
Screenshots – Static images of the original posts are stored on Cloudflare and referenced by predictable URLs (year‑month/post‑id.png).
When the dashboard starts, it authenticates to Google Drive, opens the DuckDB file, builds a few helper views, and caches colour palettes and filter choices for speed.
Who can log in and what they can do
Regular users – Log in with an email address. Their email is checked against a users.csv file stored on Google Drive. Once logged in they can explore the dashboard.
Admins – If the email matches the designated admin account (ukraine.firearms.dashboard@gmail.com), an extra Update tab appears. From there admins can trigger automated pipelines that: Pull fresh text files from Google Drive, rebuild any derived resources, and commit them to the GitHub repository. Pull new Excel spreadsheets and screenshots, process them, and publish the updated images to Cloudflare.
These pipelines run as GitHub Actions and take a few minutes; after they finish the dashboard picks up the new data on the next page reload.
Where everything lives
| Component | Where it’s hosted |
|---|---|
| Shiny app | Posit Connect Cloud (deployed from GitHub) |
| Dashboard code (open source) | Github |
| Source CSV / Excel files, users.csv | Google Drive (accessed via a service‑account token) |
| Static screenshots | Cloudflare Workers CDN (URL pattern {YYYY‑MM}/{post_id}.png) |
| Automation scripts & CI/CD | GitHub repositories + GitHub Actions |
| Secrets (tokens, passwords) | Environment variables on the server and GitHub repo secrets |
Bottom line
The portal gives a fast, interactive view of how firearms are discussed on Ukrainian social media, with a map, charts, and a searchable table. It’s built to be maintainable: data processing happens inside DuckDB, the UI updates reactively, and administrators can refresh the whole dataset with a single button that launches pre‑configured GitHub workflows. All of this is secured by email‑based login backed by a Google Drive user list, and the system is ready to be extended with more languages, authentication methods, or automated update schedules.