There are quite a few moving pieces involved in the creation of the Network IP Map. The core information is stored in a shared Google Sheet spreadsheet that’s unique to a specific Google user account. Javascript is used in conjunction with the proper access token to:
- Read the corresponding Google spreadsheet.
- Write the contents of that sheet to
network.yamlwhich is found in the_datafolder.
The Javascript is contained in the file index.html in the pull-sheet folder at the root of this site. There’s a URL commented in that page that shows you the variables that need to be provided. When the URL in that file is given the correct parameters and is called from a browser or command prompt, it passes the variables to the Javascript and the Spreadsheet is accessed and all of the resulting data is written to the network.yaml file.
The URL that’s called is currently running on a cron job that fires off every 5 minutes to ensure that the data saved to the spreadsheet is no older than 5 minutes old. If there are no changes in the data, the network.yaml file remains untouched.
The actual page where you view the information, which is called network-ip-map.md, is published in the pages/network folder. That page pulls a page from _includes called network_ip_map.html which contains a for loop that reads the network.yaml file in the _data folder and populates the table with the correct information provided by the initial Javascript.
When all is said and done, any data that is provided to the spreadsheet will be shown in the table.