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tmilev / calculator

https://calculator-algebra.org
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calculator

An online computer algebra system and homework server. Our mission is to construct a free and open source computer algebra system that serves the computational needs of both researchers and teachers. We aspire to get our system to be as powerful and useful as Mathematica and SAGE.

Programming the calculator

The calculator runs on a math expression substitution and interpretation engine capable of expressing arbitrarily complex mathematical constructs.

More details on the calculator substitution engine can be found here.

A list of all calculator handlers can be found here.

Check out our math equation editor

More details here.

Demo: https://calculator-algebra.org:8166/calculator_html/equation_editor/test_equation_editor.html

calculator installation

  1. Download the courses_calculator repository: 
    git clone --recurse-submodules -j8 https://github.com/tmilev/courses_calculator.git

    The repository courses_calculator contains the present repository as a sub-module, as well as the educational materials in the freecalc project

https://github.com/tmilev/freecalc.git

  1. Compile the calculator.

2.1. Default build.

cd courses_calculator/calculator
make -j10

The -j10 flag tells the compiler to use 10 parallel compilation jobs. Adjust the number 10 to whatever is appropriate for your system (-j10 should work on a 4Gb RAM laptop).

The calculator-algebra.org site runs, at the time of writing, with 

make -j10 optimize=1

which turns on level -02 compiler optimizations. This speeds up computations - measured to be up to 40% when computing 2019! - at the cost of tripling build times and occasionally generating obscure linker errors.

Run the calculator

Start the calculator as a web server:

calculator server

The terminal window will shows web server traffic log, and includes a link to the web browser interface.

http://localhost:8155

The default ports are 8155 (http) and 8166 (https). There is also a default computation timeout (computations that take longer than a default amount of seconds will crash).

These can be overridden of course:

./calculator server 10000 portHTTPSOpenSSL 12345 portHTTP 12346

runs the server on https port 12345, http port 12346 with a timeout of 10000 seconds.

While running for first time, you may be prompted to fill in an openSSL certificate to be used when running locally; the data of course stays on your computer (in folder calculator/certificates).

Run the calculator in development mode.

Run 

./calculator daemon

will start the calculator in daemon mode. The server will restart when you rebuild the executable successfully.

Run the calculator tests.

Run

./calculator test calculator

to test all calculator functions (some experimental ones are excluded).

Run 

./calculator test

to run the full test suite that is ran before deploying calculator-algebra.org. This will test database setup, presence of .pdf files that are part of the frontend homework files, etc. This will also check that your executable compiles cleanly without ssl and database support.

Prerequisites

  1. OS. For now, we support Linux only. Windows and Mac OS support could be added in the future (depending on resources).
    • Ubuntu (all systems using the apt package manager should work too, but that hasn't been tested). The site calculator-algebra.org runs Ubuntu and compiles out of the box. We expect all versions after 14.04 to work out-of-the-box.
    • calculator-algebra.org was ran on CentOS 6 for a while and worked out-of-the-box.
    • The calculator was successfully built and ran on a Windows 10 Linux subsystem. This was a single run on localhost.
    • We will add your Linux flavor upon request. We may need your help with your package manager.
  2. git. needed to download the source.
  3. [Optional] openssl development libraries. Without openSSL, the calculator will not be able to provide any login services, and some "administator-only" functions may be missing.

Port redirect with ip tables

To redirect port 80 to port 8155:

sudo iptables -A INPUT -i eth0 -p tcp --dport 80 -j ACCEPT
sudo iptables -A INPUT -i eth0 -p tcp --dport 8155 -j ACCEPT
sudo iptables -A PREROUTING -t nat -i eth0 -p tcp --dport 80 -j REDIRECT --to-port 8155

Similarly for redirecting port 443 to 8166:

sudo iptables -A INPUT -i eth0 -p tcp --dport 443 -j ACCEPT
sudo iptables -A INPUT -i eth0 -p tcp --dport 8166 -j ACCEPT
sudo iptables -A PREROUTING -t nat -i eth0 -p tcp --dport 443 -j REDIRECT --to-port 8166

Finally, save the IP table rules. For ubuntu:

sudo apt-get install iptables-persistent

The package above should automagically save your ip table rules. If not, run

su
iptables-save > /etc/iptables/rules.v4
exit

Recaptcha secret.

The calculator login system uses google's recapcha. To find out more about reCAPTCHA, google google recaptcha.

The system should run fine without reCAPTCHA setup, however, the forgot login button will not work.

You can get your recaptcha client secret and public info from:

https://www.google.com/recaptcha/admin#site/

Put the secret in a file (copy+paste the secret contents into the file):

certificates/recaptcha-secret.txt

and the public info in (copy+paste contents):

certificates/recaptcha-public.txt