eivindst / quickfeed

Autograder server and React-based web frontend (work in progress)

agserver

Roles and Concepts

The system has three user roles.

• Administrators can create new courses and promote other users to become administrator. It is common that all teachers that are responsible for one or more courses be an administrator. The administrator role is system-wide.

• Teachers are associated with one or more courses. A teacher can view results for all students in his course(s). A course can have many teachers. A teacher is anyone associated with the course that are not students, such as professors and teaching assistants.

• Students are associated with one or more courses. A student can view his own results and progress on individual assignments.

The following concepts are important to understand.

• Assignments are organized into folders in a git repository.
  • Individual assignments are solved by one student. There is one repository for individual assignments.
  • Group assignments are solved by a group of students. There is one repository for group assignments.
• Submissions are made by a student submitting his code to a supported git service provider (e.g. github or gitlab).

Download and install

go get -u github.com/autograde/quickfeed

Running the server

# Server listening on port 8080 serving static files from /public at https://example.com/.
quickfeed -service.url example.com -http.addr :8080 -http.public /public

As a bootstrap mechanism, the first user to sign in is automatically made administrator for the system.

Install for React web development

cd public
npm install
webpack

Development

We accept pull requests

We are happy to accept pull requests from anyone that want to help out in our effort to implement a strong autograder platform. To create a PR, simply fork our repo, or create a new branch, and then follow the usual guidelines for creating a PR.

Style guidelines

We chose to implement Autograder in Go and Typescript because these langauges offer simplicity and type safety. We therefore require that certain style guidelines are followed when creating pull requests.

For Go, we expect code to follow these style guidelines and list of common mistakes:

• The gofmt should always be used. This is usually handled automatically in VSCode when the formatOnSave option is set to true; see below.

• Go Code Review Comments. In particular, note the section on how to Handle Errors, Mixed Caps, Variable Names.

For Typescript, we think these style guidelines look reasonable. Moreover, the formatOnSave and tslint.run options (see below) should help maintain reasonable style.

Note that we currently violate the interface naming guideline by using the I prefix on interfaces, and several of the other guidelines. We should refactor these, to the extent possible.

Working with webpack

To ensure that webpack bundle files are updated when you pull in changes or rebase from the repository you can add the following script to the files post-merge (invoked on git pull) and post-rewrite (invoked on git rebase) in the .git/hooks/ folder.

#!/bin/sh
cd $GOPATH/src/github.com/autograde/quickfeed/public
webpack

If you don't want to run webpack to create the bundle files on git pull/rebase, you will need to manually run webpack in the public folder.

Visual Studio Code Configuration

The development team has mainly used VSCode and we recommend using the tslint plugin and the Go plugin together with the following configuration settings.

{
    "go.inferGopath": true,
    "go.lintTool": "megacheck",
    "editor.formatOnSave": true,
    "tslint.run": "onSave",
}