Illinois Open Source Queue

A micro-service queue for holding open office hours.

Join the #queue-general channel on the UIUC OSS Slack team to keep up with the queue!

Using the Queue at Illinois

At UIUC, this queue is hosted as a free service by Computer Science and EngrIT.

• View the queue at https://queue.illinois.edu/
• Request to have a queue created for your course by filling out this short form

Contribution Guidelines

• Join the #queue-dev channel on the UIUC OSS Slack team to seek development support
• Claim an issue by commenting on an open issue in order to indicate to others that you are working on the task
• Once you are ready to submit for review make sure to:
  • Include a CHANGELOG.md entry following existing format
  • If making API changes, note the change in API.md
  • If your change requires new dependencies, add them to package.json
  • Tag a lead developer in the reviewers section

If you wish to report a bug, feature request, etc., please open a new issue (first checking that your issue has not already been filed).

Running the Queue from Source

Running locally in dev mode:

• Clone the repository
• Install node and npm
• Install dependencies: npm install in the cloned directory
• Start the server: npm run dev
  • Access the queue from a browser at localhost:3000
  • You can run it on a different port by setting the PORT environment variable

Production config

Run npm run build to build assets for production; read more about the build process in the docs. Run npm run start to start the application.

Several configuration options are exposed via environment variables and .env:

• PORT: controls which port the app will be served from.
• BASE_URL: allows the app to be served from somewhere other than the server root. This affects asset and API routes, websocket endpoints, generated links, and more. Note that for this to work effectively, the app must still receive the base URL as part of the request; this is important if the app is reverse-proxied behind Apache. For instance, if the queue is served from /my/path/, then you should run with BASE_URL=/my/path (note the lack of trailing slash), and a request for queue 1 should be received as /my/path/queue/1.
• JWT_SECRET: a secret key used to sign JSON Web Tokens for our users.
• UID_NAME: official name for user ids (default: email)
• UID_ARTICLE: article used in reference to UID_NAME (default: an)
• EPPN_SUFFIX: the expected suffix for all valid Shibboleth eppn attributes. If this variable is not present, then all Shibboleth responses will be accepted.
• INSTITUTION_NAME: to set branding other than 'Illinois'.

Database information is also stored through environment variables, and can be configured for multiple environments depending on the value of NODE_ENV.

DB_USERNAME_<ENV>="username"
DB_PASSWORD_<ENV>="password"
DB_DATABASE_<ENV>="database_name"
DB_HOST_<ENV>="localhost"
DB_DIALECT_<ENV>="sqlite"
DB_LOGGING_<ENV>="false"
DB_STORAGE_<ENV>="./dev.sqlite"  # Sqlite only

# Example for development:
DB_USERNAME_DEVELOPMENT="username"
DB_PASSWORD_DEVELOPMENT="password"
DB_DATABASE_DEVELOPMENT="queue"
DB_HOST_DEVELOPMENT="localhost"
DB_DIALECT_DEVELOPMENT="sqlite"
DB_LOGGING_DEVELOPMENT="false"
DB_STORAGE_DEVELOPMENT="./dev.sqlite"  # Sqlite only

Note that for SQLite databases, only DB_STORAGE_<ENV> is required.