gitmanager

Gitmanager is a service for building and validating courses, and configuring other services in the A+ ecosystem. The courses are loaded through git, and then automatically built inside a configurable container. If the build passes validation, the course and its exercises are configured on A+ and compatible grading services.

The application is implemented on Django 3.2 (gitmanager/settings.py) and requires Python 3.7+.

Gitmanager can be run stand alone without the full stack to test any part of the process in the local system environment. Course and exercise configuration is in COURSES_PATH directory (defaults to courses) once built and published.

Course files are downloaded using git to the BUILD_PATH directory, where the course is then built. If the build is successfull, the course directory is then copied to the STORE_PATH directory. That directory is solely for storage, that version of the course is not available until the course is published. The course is published by A+ when A+ fetches and updates the course configuration. Once the course is published, the built course is copied from the STORE_PATH directory to the COURSES_PATH directory.

Installing for development

You may run the app with Docker without installing the whole software stack locally. It is easy to get started with the aplus-manual course: apluslms/aplus-manual. The dockerfile in .github/workflows should contain everything needed to run the application.

Ubuntu 20.04

1. Clone the software

General requirements

sudo apt-get install git libjpeg-dev
sudo apt-get install libxml2-dev libxslt-dev zlib1g-dev

Install software

git clone https://github.com/apluslms/gitmanager.git

2. Python requirements

sudo apt-get install python3 python3-dev python3-pip python3-venv

Then, create virtual environment with gitmanager requirements.

python3 -m venv venv
source venv/bin/activate
pip install wheel
pip install -r gitmanager/requirements.txt

3. Running the gitmanager application

Run the Django app locally:

cd gitmanager
python manage.py runserver

4. For configuring courses and exercises, see

courses/README.md

Installing the full stack

Ubuntu 20.04

0. User account

On a server, one can install gitmanager for a specific gitmanager user account.

sudo adduser --system --group \
  --shell /bin/bash --home /srv/gitmanager \
  --gecos "A-plus gitmanager service" \
  gitmanager
su - gitmanager

Then follow the "Installing for development" and continue from here.

1. Web server configuration

Create temporary directory for sockets

echo "d /run/gitmanager 0750 gitmanager www-data - -" | \
  sudo tee /etc/tmpfiles.d/gitmanager.conf > /dev/null
sudo systemd-tmpfiles --create

Install uwsgi to run WSGI processes. The gitmanager directory and user must be set in the configuration files.

uWSGI with systemd (Ubuntu >= 15.04)

source ~/venv/bin/activate
pip install uwsgi
cp ~/gitmanager/doc/etc-uwsgi-gitmanager.ini ~/gitmanager-uwsgi.ini
sudo cp ~/gitmanager/doc/etc-systemd-system-uwsgi.service /etc/systemd/system/gitmanager-uwsgi.service
# EDIT ~/gitmanager-uwsgi.ini
# EDIT /etc/systemd/system/gitmanager-uwsgi.service, set the correct uwsgi path to ExecStart

Operate the workers:

# as root
systemctl status gitmanager-uwsgi
systemctl start gitmanager-uwsgi
systemctl enable gitmanager-uwsgi  # start on boot
# Graceful application reload
touch ~/gitmanager-uwsgi.ini

nginx

apt-get install nginx
sed -e "s/__HOSTNAME__/$(hostname)/g" \
  ~/gitmanager/doc/etc-nginx-sites-available-gitmanager > \
  /etc/nginx/sites-available/$(hostname).conf
ln -s ../sites-available/$(hostname).conf /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/$(hostname).conf
# Edit /etc/nginx/sites-available/$(hostname).conf if necessary
# Check nginx config validity
nginx -t
systemctl reload nginx

apache2

apt-get install apache2 libapache2-mod-uwsgi
# Configure based on doc/etc-apache2-sites-available-gitmanager
a2enmod headers

Deployment

See DEPLOYMENT.md in the docs folder.