DevU

DevU is an automated software-grading platform being developed at the University at Buffalo. DevU aims to be incredibly extensible, allowing professors to add any functionality they desire without reaching a dead end. It will eventually replace Autolab and other services.

This repo contains everything necessary to run the entirety of DevU in Docker:

• The DevU back-end API
• The build process for the DevU front-end web client
• An Nginx web server to host the front-end files
• A PostgreSQL database
• A configuration builder for the back-end API

Contributors

DevU is open-source and contributors are welcome. To contribute to the project, use the following steps:

1. Look through the issue in the repo to find one that you'd like to work on 2. If there is an issue that doesn't exist, create the issue first
2. Claim the issue to let the team know that you are working on it 4. If you are a contributor on the project, assign yourself ot the task 5. If you are not a contributor, leave a comment on the issue letting the team know of your intentions
3. Create a feature branch off of develop for your work 7. Create a fork of the repo and push your contributions to a branch on that repo 8. If you are a contributor on the project, you may create a branch in this repo. In this case, your branch name should be related to the feature you are developing
4. Complete and test your code 10. When committing, be sure to use meaningful commit messages that describe the code contributed in each commit. The first line should be a summary of the changes. If more description is needed, include these details in subsequent lines
5. Create a PR from your feature branch into the develop branch of this repo 11. Please follow the PR template that is automatically created when you make the PR. Be sure to replace the default text with a description of your contribution and a link to the task(s) that it resolves
6. Address any comments and change requests made on your PR during the code review 12. Push updates to your branch to update the PR
7. Once the maintainers are satisfied with your PR, it wil be merged into the develop branch

Getting Started

This process might seem like a lot if you're new to many these technologies, but I promise it's at least 10 times easier than manually getting DevU running on your system without Docker.

1. Install Docker

You'll need to have Docker installed, which now includes Docker Compose. Docker allows everyone to run software in an equivalent environment, so we don't run into differences between operating systems or tool versions. The installation varies depending on your operating system, so follow the appropriate guide on their website.

2. Clone this repo to your computer.

Note for Windows users

You have to run the following commands, this repo contains shell scripts that have LF line endings. By default, git will convert them CRLF on windows this will cause the script to not run

The command below will configure git to not change line endings for the files in the repo

 git config --global core.autocrlf input 

Open a terminal.

• On Windows, press Windows + R to open a run prompt, type "cmd", and press enter.
• On MacOS, open the Launchpad (on your Dock) and launch "Terminal".
• On Linux, you know.

You'll need to have Git installed. It's usually preinstalled on Linux and MacOS. There's a good chance you've already installed Git if you're using Windows. You can verify the installation by running git --version in the terminal.

If you need to install Git, you can follow the appropriate instructions for your operating system here.

I highly recommend setting up an SSH key for GitHub. It's not strictly necessary, but I'll assume you've properly configured an SSH key for this guide.

In the terminal, (optionally create and) navigate to the directory you'd like to clone this repo to.

mkdir demo
cd demo

Clone the repo.

git clone git@github.com:makeopensource/devU.git

Enter the project repo.

cd devU

3. Run the Project with Docker Compose

docker compose up --build

4. Connect to the Web Client

In your browser, connect to http://localhost:9000, and you should see the login screen.

If you only see the text "error," wait a few seconds; the backend takes some time to start running. If it takes longer than a minute, review the output in your terminal for errors, most notably: Why is the backend service failing to start right after cloning the repo?

Frequently Asked Questions

Why is the backend service failing to start right after cloning the repo?

It seems that sometimes the database migrations aren't made when they should be. If you see the following, try re-running docker compose up --build a few times.

Error during migration run:
Error: Configuration property "auth.jwt.activeKeyId" is not defined
at Config.get (/app/node_modules/config/lib/config### Why is the devU-client/devU-api repo empty?

If this is the case, you would get an error similar to this:

[+] Building 0.0s (0/0)
unable to prepare context: path "<repo>/<filename>" not found
    We are using `submodules` for this project, which means that both `devU-client/` and `devU-api/` are links to other repos. Make sure you follow the directions for cloning carefully: use the `--recurse-submodules` option when cloning.

    **If you already cloned the project**, run the command `git submodule update --init --recursive`, which should pull the appropriate submodules for you.
    .js:182:11)

It usually works within 5 runs. I haven't been able to narrow down why this happens. Further investigation is welcome!

You should see the following once it successfully makes the migrations:

query: SELECT * FROM "information_schema"."tables" WHERE "table_schema" = current_schema() AND "table_name" = 'migrations'
query: CREATE TABLE "migrations" ("id" SERIAL NOT NULL, "timestamp" bigint NOT NULL, "name" character varying NOT NULL, CONSTRAINT "PK_8c82d7f526340ab734260ea46be" PRIMARY KEY ("id"))
query: SELECT * FROM "migrations" "migrations" ORDER BY "id" DESC
0 migrations are already loaded in the database.
8 migrations were found in the source code.
8 migrations are new migrations that needs to be executed.
query: START TRANSACTION
query: CREATE TABLE "users" ("id" SERIAL NOT NULL, "createdAt" TIMESTAMP NOT NULL DEFAULT now(), "updatedAt" TIMESTAMP NOT NULL DEFAULT now(), "deletedAt" TIMESTAMP, "username" character varying(32) NOT NULL, "name" character varying(128) NOT NULL, "email" character varying(128) NOT NULL, CONSTRAINT "users_primary_key_constraint" PRIMARY KEY ("id"))