Water

What is water?

Water is system for managing the hand-in and reviewing of programming assignments. It combines a git-based backend with an awesome web interface.

What is awesome about it?

• Hand-ins can be made via the command line using a git push or via the awesome web interface
• The web interface is awesome because you can:
  • upload multiple files simultaneously
  • see and manage the tree structure of your hand-in
  • mix hand-ins via git and the web interface
• Teachers and assistants can comment on specific lines of code
• Hand-ins can be automatically checked for compliance with a set of technical requirements - no more waiting days just to be rejected because a mere technicality

Setup

Preparation

1. Make sure you run ruby 1.9.2 or above using ruby -v, otherwise install it.
2. Install beanstalkd, used for internal messaging.
3. Install and start PostgreSQL.
4. Install foreman using gem install foreman
5. Make sure you have some kind of sshd installed

Installation

1. Clone project using git clone git@github.com:water/mainline.git water
2. Checkout the master branch. git checkout master
3. Navigate to the config folder, create a file called database.yml with the your postgresql credentials. Example credentials
4. Install all dependencies using bundle install
5. Create two empty log files, just in case rails complains about it, touch log/development.log log/test.log
6. Rename gitorious.sample.yml to gitorious.yml and change hosts and usernames to suit your system
7. Create the db and migrate it bundle exec rake db:create db:migrate.
8. Start poller, git-daemon beanstalkd and spork by running foreman start
9. Seed the db CLEAR=1 bundle exec rake db:seed
10. Start server, rails s
11. Navigate to localhost:3000
12. Login using the information from db/seeds.rb.

Install PostgreSQL

Linux

1. Install PostgreSQL, use your favorite package manager or download src from http://www.postgresql.org/download/
2. Start the server deamon, the precompiled binary packages comes with init-scripts (eg rc.d start postgresql || service postgresql start) or you can run pg_ctl start
3. Create a user
   • sudo su postgres
   • psql
   • CREATE ROLE username WITH SUPERUSER CREATEDB CREATEROLE PASSWORD 'password' LOGIN;
4. (optional) Add postgres to autostart using distro-specific methods eg (chkconfig postgresql on || add it to runlevel 5 init-scripts, run-level 3 for servers)

Ubuntu

1. sudo apt-get install postgresql postgresql-server-dev-9.1
2. Follow the Linux guidelines above about creating a user
3. sudo service postgresql restart

OS X

1. brew install postgresql
2. pg_ctl -D /usr/local/var/postgres -l /usr/local/var/postgres/server.log start

OR

1. Get the binary from http://www.postgresql.org/download/macosx/ The binary includes the pgAdmin program which may aid in development and debugging.

Install beanstalkd

Ubuntu

1. sudo apt-get install beanstalkd

OS X

1. brew install beanstalkd

Generating nice graphic of model

To better get a understanding for our model, it's nice to get a graphical overview of it. railroady can create it for you automatically, install if first by gem install railroady and then issue

railroady -M | grep -v "Overwriting" | dot -Tsvg > Model.svg

where the grep -v part is a hack to get rid of the warnings rails wrongly writes to stdin rather than stderr.

Tests

1. Migrate test database RAILS_ENV=test bundle exec rake db:create db:migrate
2. Start the DRb server (spork) by running foreman start.
3. Wait until it says Spork is ready and listening on 8988!, which takes about ~20 sec.
4. Download fixtures using git submodule update --init
5. Run a test
   • a specific test file rspec spec/my_spec.rb
   • all specs rspec spec/
   • a specific line in a specific file rspec spec/my_spec.rb -l 10