StudyBuddies

Release Notes (v0.4)

Bug Fixes:

• Fixed a bug causing questions not answered by a specific user to appear in the answer tab, as opposed to all unanswered questions
• Created a backend flask server template
• Updated node packages to fix vulnerabilities

UI Improvements:

• General
  • Added a new confirmation screen within the sign-in process
• Ask/Answer Page
  • Updated colors, designs, and centered question/answer cards to implement material deisgn
  • Fixed an incorrectly formatted button
  • Fixed a bug causing a user to be stuck on the ask page after asking or answering a question
  • Fixed a bug causing answers to disappear
  • Added shadows to the question and answer cards
• Leaderboard Page
  • Fixed the title
  • Updated styling to match material design elements exhibited prior
• Question History Page
  • Added and formatted answered question cards mirroring the material design elements of the Ask/Answer Page
  • Added shadows to the answered question cards
  • Added author, date, and time to answered question cards
• Challenge Page
  • Updated the styling to match the prior material design elements
  • Removed superfluous code on intialization of the Challenge react component
  • Updated the Challenge mechanisms in incrementing question and answer counts, user feedback to submitting answers, and scoring
• Chat Page
  • Added a working sender label to chatting instead of having a static sender
  • Created functionality to allow the group name to be changed in the chat module

Installation Guide

The codebase is organized into 3 directories: Backend, StudyBuddiesApp, and ManagementPortal

• The Backend/ directory contains all Python code for the Flask server and database connection. This can be deployed locally or to AWS
• The StudyBuddiesApp/ directory contains the React Native app. This talks to the backend and AWS directly
• The ManagementPortal/ directory contains the code for the portal allowing administrators to manage study groups and see content

Pre-requisites

• Must have Python 2.7 installed on the computer to run the backend
• Must have react-native tools installed (installation instructions for expo are described here)

Dependencies

• All dependencies are managed and do not need to be manually tracked. They are described as follows:
  • Dependencies for the Backend are managed by a Python2.7 virtualenv
  • All dependencies are tracked in the requirements.txt file (see the file for a complete list). Any addition/removal of a dependency must be changed in this file.
  • Dependencies for the StudyBuddiesApp is managed through npm and is seen in the package.json file (see the file for a complete list)
  • Any addition/removal of a dependency must be through npm install new-dependency --save or npm uninstall old-dependency --save

Installing Code:

• git clone https://github.com/karshinlin/StudyBuddies.git to clone the repo
• git checkout dev to work on the dev branch
• npm install to install all the dependencies that the branch has that you don't have locally
• npm audit fix to fix all the vulnerabilities (if it tells you to)
• npm install -g @aws-amplify/cli to install the amplify CLI (https://aws-amplify.github.io/docs/)
• Get a high level overview of what amplify does for you (https://aws-amplify.github.io/). It basically connects our javascript code in the mobile app to AWS.
• amplify configure to configure amplify on your machine
  • Follow the guided setup
    • Login with the studybuddies@gbes.com account when needed (creds: https://docs.google.com/document/d/13ZkJTIyT691eqgtspVc9zZuUpPt2k8JRnEBu61GQCzA/edit?usp=sharing)
    • Eventually, you'll need to make an IAM user to connect your terminal to amplify. A browser will pop up for this...just follow all the defaults.
      • After all the steps, you'll see a table with the user you just created. Your terminal will ask you for the access key and secret access key from that table.
      • Name this user amplify when prompted (it shoes default by default)
• amplify init to boot up the amplify configurations from the /amplify folder
  • use an existing environment when prompted (it's name is dev)
• npm install -g yarn
• npm install -g expo-cli (not sure if this is needed but that's what we did)
• yarn add expo
• close out of all terminals and emulators relating to this app
• open up a terminal again and navigate to the app folder (/StuddyBuddiesApp)
• yarn run ios

Backend Setup:

• [One Time] Within StudyBuddies/Backend directory, create a virtualenv:
  • Install virtualenv if you don't have it: sudo pip3 install virtualenv
  • Create a virtualenv in the Backend directory and name it "venv": virtualenv -p python2.7 venv
  • NOTE: We use python2.7 to be compatible with AWS. You need python2.7 installed in your machine to create a virtual environment from it.
  • Activate the virtualenv: source venv/bin/activate
• [Every time] Load all dependencies for the Flask server:
  • source venv/bin/activate
  • pip install -r requirements.txt

Access MySQL Database:

• Install MySQL Workbench (this should download MySQL)
• Create a new connection to AWS RDS (credentials are in config.py)

Deployment to AWS Elastic Beanstalk:

• [One Time] Install EB CLI tools from https://github.com/aws/aws-elastic-beanstalk-cli-setup
  • This is outside of the virtualenv so everyone will need to do this using their OS Python
• [One Time] Make sure you add the tool to the PATH variable with the following command depending on environment:
  1. Bash: echo 'export PATH="/Users/karshinlin/.ebcli-virtual-env/executables:$PATH"' >> ~/.bash_profile && source ~/.bash_profile
  2. Zsh: echo 'export PATH="/Users/karshinlin/.ebcli-virtual-env/executables:$PATH"' >> ~/.zshenv && source ~/.zshenv
     • Now you should be able to see options when running eb status
     • You may need to initialize your eb environment with eb init
• Using Elastic Beanstalk CLI, run eb deploy to deploy a new version of this application. Otherwise you can just run the Flask server locally with python application.py in your virtualenv in the /Backend directory

Run Instructions

• From the StudyBuddiesApp/ directory, you should run yarn run ios from terminal
  • In the global.js file, there are two urls, one is for the localhost backend (which must be running)
  • To run the localhost backend, run python application.py after you have activated your virtualenv
  • If you are using the AWS EB endpoint, the updated code must be deployed to AWS (eb deploy)

Troubleshooting

• If there is an error loading modules, make sure you have installed all required dependencies
  • For the backend, this means running pip install -r requirements.txt
  • For the StudyBuddiesApp, this means running npm install
• If the expo localhost connection is acting up, close all terminals and rerun yarn run ios. Sometimes, expo has trouble starting up and needs a manual quit.