exercism.io

To get started using exercism.io to practice or provide feedback on other people's code, check out the getting started page on the website.

Contact Us

To report a bug, suggest improvements to exercism.io, or if you're having trouble installing or using the CLI, please open a GitHub issue.

If you're having trouble writing the code for an exercise on exercism.io, then your best bet is StackOverflow (remember to tag the question with #exercism). Another option is to submit the code even though it doesn't pass the tests yet, and then go to your submission page to explain where you're stuck.

We welcome questions, and will do our best to help you out!

Jump in and chat with other exercism enthusiasts on the #exercism channel on irc.freenode.net. It's not a very active channel, but we're a friendly bunch.

For occasional updates, such as new language tracks being launched, sign up for the newsletter.

Exercism.io was started by Katrina. To get in touch with her, send an email to [email protected].

Contributions

Exercism.io is free and open source, and many, many people have contributed to the project by:

Reporting, reproducing, or fixing bugs
Triaging issues
Suggesting, discussing, or implementing features
Refactoring
Improving the design of the site
Adding tests
Improving documentation
Improving test suites for the language tracks
Adding new problems to existing tracks
Porting problems to new tracks
Providing feedback on people's code
Reviewing pull requests
... and more

This is a project that started by accident and could never have gotten off the ground by the efforts of any single person.

Thank you!

Contributing

If you would like to contribute to exercism, then please read the CONTRIBUTING.md document, which describes the various parts of the system and how they fit together.

We are working to improve this document, and if you find any part of it confusing, or if you can't figure out how to get started with something, then rest assured it's not you, it's us! Please open up a new issue to describe what you were hoping to contribute with, and what you're wondering about, and we'll figure out together how to improve the documentation.

Setup

If you'd like to do work on the exercism.io app, then you'll need to have it running locally.

Prerequisites

For working on the backend you'll need both Ruby and PostgreSQL. Frontend development uses Node.js.

To install Ruby, check out RVM, rbenv or chruby.

PostgreSQL can be installed with Homebrew on Mac OS X: brew install postgresql
If you're on a Linux system with apt-get then run: apt-get install postgresql-9.2

Install Node.js and npm on Mac OS X with Homebrew: brew install node
On other systems see the Node.js docs.

GitHub OAuth

In order to be able to log into your local version of the application, you will need to create some keys on GitHub that the app can talk to.

Go to https://github.com/settings/applications/new and enter the following:

Application name: You can name it whatever you want. I have Exercism (Dev).
Homepage URL: http://localhost:4567
Authorization callback URL: http://localhost:4567/github/callback

Click Register application, and you'll see something like this:

Later you will add the Client ID and Client Secret to a configuration file.

The Code

If you're unfamiliar with git and GitHub, don't worry. We'll gladly help you out if you get stuck. GitHub also has some helpful guides for getting started.

First, you need to get ahold of the code, so you have a copy of it locally that you can make changes to.

Fork this codebase to your own GitHub account.
Clone your fork, and change directory into the root of the exercism.io project.

Configuration

If you use a Ruby version manager such as RVM, rbenv or chruby, then: cp .ruby-version.example .ruby-version
Copy the environment config: cp config/env .env
Open .env and add the Client ID and Client Secret from the previous GitHub OAuth steps.

All the commented out values in .env can be left alone for now.

You don't need to fill in the values for email stuff unless you're going to be working on the emails specifically.

You don't need to fill in the EXERCISES_API value unless you're going to be working on the x-api codebase.

Dependencies

Next, make sure all the application dependencies are installed:

Install gems with: bundle install
Install MailCatcher with: gem install mailcatcher

Data

Finally, set up the database. This means both creating the underlying database, and migrating so that it has all the correct tables. Also run a script to add fake data, so there are things to click on and look at while working on the app.

Create the PostgreSQL database: rake db:setup
Run the database migrations: rake db:migrate
Fetch the seed data: rake db:seeds:fetch
Seed the database: rake db:seed

Run The Application

Start the server with foreman start (sometimes you have to bundle exec foreman start).

Then you can log in at localhost:4567

Frontend Development Setup

Lineman watches for file changes and compiles them automatically. It is not required to be running for the server to run though.

Install Lineman with: npm install -g lineman
To run: cd frontend and start Lineman with lineman run

SCSS

Start Compass with: compass watch
To compile: compass compile

For CSS we are using Sass (with .scss). Feel free to use Bootstrap 3 components and mixins. Or if you want to use even more mixins you can use Compass. Structurewise we try to separate components, mixins and layouts. Where layouts should be a single page (using an HTML id as a selector) and components should be reusable partials, which can look different by layout.

You can find the Compass config in lib/app/config.rb.

Styleguide

Our styleguide is under /styleguide and built with KSS, which enables you to write examples to *.scss files.

Sending Emails

MailCatcher is used to catch and view emails locally.

Do the following to test an email:

Start MailCatcher: mailcatcher or mailcatcher -f to run in the foreground
Send a test message. For example, ruby test/services/notification_message_test.rb will send a test notification email.
Open localhost:1080 and you should see the test email

If you want to send emails, you will need to fill out the relevant environment variables in .env and uncomment the lines so the variables get exported.

Console

There's a script in bin/console that will load pry with the exercism environment loaded. This will let you poke around at the objects in the system, such as finding users and changing things about submissions or comments, making it easier to test specific things.

user = User.find_by_username 'whatever'
user.submissions

Testing

Create a test database: createdb -O exercism exercism_test
Prepare the test environment: RACK_ENV=test rake db:migrate
Make sure MailCatcher is running: mailcatcher
Run the test suite: rake or rake test

To run a single test suite, you can do so with:

ruby path/to/the_test.rb

If it complains about dependencies, then either we forgot to require the correct dependencies (a distinct possibility), or we are dependening on a particular tag of a gem installed directly from GitHub (this happens on occasion).

If there's a git dependency, you can do this:

bundle exec ruby path/to/the_test.rb

For the require, you'll need to figure out what the missing dependency is. Feel free to open a GitHub issue. It's likely that someone familiar with the codebase will be able to identify the problem immediately.

Code Coverage

To enable code coverage run:

COVERAGE=1 rake test

Browse the results located in coverage/index.html

Deployment

Let Heroku know that Lineman will be building our assets. From the command line:

heroku config:set BUILDPACK_URL=https://github.com/testdouble/heroku-buildpack-lineman-ruby.git

License

GNU Affero General Public License

This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU Affero General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU Affero General Public License for more details.

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exercism.io's Introduction