This project is no longer actively maintained, and has been archived

Aestimia allows a mentor community to assess work based on submitted evidence and a rubric.

Prerequisites

You'll need node 0.8, as well as MongoDB.

PhantomJS 1.8 or later is required to run the test suite. MongoDB is expected to be available on localhost at the default port while the test suite is running, too; the test database will be used.

Quick Start

git clone git://github.com/mozilla/aestimia.git
cd aestimia
npm install
npm test
DEBUG= API_SECRET=api COOKIE_SECRET=cookie node bin/aestimia.js

By default, the aestimia database on the local mongo instance is used.

Once the server has started, you'll probably want to visit http://localhost:3000/demo and enter api (or whatever your API_SECRET is set to) in the API Secret field.

Then, add yourself as a mentor from the Update a mentor section, and create a submission in the Create a submission section. Log in as yourself via Persona, go back to the site root, and you should see the submission there waiting for you to review.

Environment Variables

• COOKIE_SECRET is the secret used to encrypt and sign cookies, to prevent tampering.

• API_SECRET is the secret used to make API requests to Aestimia. If absent, the API is disabled. API documentation can be found at /docs once Aestimia has launched.

• PERSONA_AUDIENCE is the origin of the server, as it appears to users. If DEBUG is enabled, this defaults to http://localhost:PORT. Otherwise, it must be defined.

• MONGO_URL is the URL to the MongoDB instance. If this isn't present, the app looks at MONGOHQ_URL, followed by MONGOLAB_URI. If none of these are present, the default value, mongodb://localhost/aestimia, is used.

• DEBUG represents a boolean value: if the variable exists with any value (even the empty string), the boolean is true, otherwise it's false. Setting this to true makes the server use unminified source code on the client-side, among other things.

• ENABLE_STUBBYID, like DEBUG, represents a boolean value. If it and DEBUG are both true, then the stubbyid persona simulator is enabled. This allows anyone to easily log in as anyone they want, which makes manual testing and debugging easier. However, it should also never be enabled on production sites, which is why DEBUG must also be enabled for this feature to work.

• THEME_DIR is the path to a theme. Any relative paths are resolved based on the root directory of Aestimia. Thus setting THEME_DIR to theme/csol would activate the Chicago Summer of Learning theme.

• PORT is the port that the server binds to. Defaults to 3000.

• SSL_KEY is the path to a private key to use for SSL. If this is provided, the server must be accessed over HTTPS rather than HTTP, and the SSL_CERT environment variable must also be defined.

• SSL_CERT is the path to a SSL certificate. If this is provided, the server must be accessed over HTTPS rather than HTTP, and the SSL_KEY environment variable must also be defined.

API

Submissions and mentor management are accessible over an API. If you have an instance of Aestimia running, interactive API documentation is available at /demo. Otherwise, you can still read the static documentation.

Themes

Aestimia looks like generic Bootstrap out of the box, but it can be themed. See theme/csol for an example.

To enable a theme, set the THEME_DIR environment variable to the root directory of the theme; see above for more details.

Acceptance Tests

Acceptance tests are automatically run with npm test. Their behavior can be changed by the following environment variables:

• ACCEPTANCE_DEBUG represents a boolean value. If it exists, logging output will be displayed that makes the tests easier to debug.

• ACCEPTANCE_BROWSER_NAME is the name of the browser to use when running the acceptance tests. If this is phantom (the default), phantomjs is automatically started and used for browser automation. Otherwise, it's assumed that a WebDriver server is hosted at port 4444 and the browserName capability is set to this environment variable.

Test Coverage

Build/install jscoverage, run make test-cov, then open coverage.html in a browser.

Coverage should always be at 100%. Pull requests that break this will be rejected.