jolpango / edutask

A toy project for the course PA1417 to apply testing techniques.

Edutask: a Training System for PA1417

This is the codebase for edutask, a simple web-based application where users can sign up, add YouTube videos to a watchlist, and associate these videos with todo lists in order to keep track of educational material. The application consists of a database using MongoDB, a server using Flask, and a graphical user interface using React. You can find more information in the specification.

Please keep the following in mind:

• The system contains intended flaws, which are to be identified applying test techniques.
• The system is a work-in-progress, meaning that some functionalities are not yet implemented. Focus on the functionalities that already exist, everything else can be disregarded for now.

Setup

There are two ways to get the system running: either you start all components (database, backend, frontend) locally, or you use the dockerized version.

Dockerized

Prerequisites

Your system must have Docker enabled.

Installing and Running

The following steps need to be performed in order to start the system:

1. Make sure that docker is currently running. For example, on Windows, DockerDesktop must be running.
2. Navigate a console (with admin rights) to the root folder of the repository and run docker-compose up.

This will setup a network with three separate containers, one for each component. You can then access the system via a browser at localhost:3000.

Local

Prerequisites

Make sure to have the following software available on your system to run this application:

• Database: MongoDB
• Server: Python and pip
• Frontend: nodejs

Installing libraries

The following steps need to be performed before running the system for the first time:

1. In the root folder of this repository, create the folder data\db
2. In the folder backend run the following command to install all relevant python packages: pip install -r requirements.pip
3. in the folder frontend run the following command to install all relevant node packages npm install --dev

Starting the application

The following steps need to be performed in order to start the edutask application:

1. Navigate a shell to the root folder of this repository and run the following command (you might need admin rights for this) to start the database: mongod --port 27017 --dbpath data\db
2. Navigate a different shell to the folder backend and run the following command to start the server: python ./main.py
3. Navigate a third shell into the folder frontend and run the following commend to start the user interface: npm start

Now a browser window should open and display the frontend of the system on localhost:3000.

Interaction

You can interact with the system in different ways. Here are a few to explore the different components of the system:

1. To interact with the database directly, you can use the MongoDB Compass: while the database is running, connect to it via the compass interface using the connection string mongodb://localhost:27017. You can now see and manipulate all data in the database manually. Alternatively, you can use the MongoDB Shell.
2. To interact with the server directly, you can use a service like Postman: while the database and server are running, create a new collection in the Postman GUI and "add requests". Select a HTTP method and an URL, for example GET http://localhost:5000/users/all. You can find all available API endpoints in the backend/src/blueprints folder or by inspecting the console of your server, where all API endpoints are printed when starting the server. Try for example PST http://localhost:5000/populate to populate the database with an initial user and some tasks. Alternatively to Postman, you can use any browser to interact with the API of the server directly on localhost:5000. Interaction between the browser and the server is, however, limited to GET requests.
3. To interact with the frontend directly, simply use the browser which is opened when running npm start. You can access the frontend at http://localhost:3000

Troubleshooting

The following issues are known and may require attention:

1. The system was built using nodejs 17, which has a known compatability issue due to its upgrade to OpenSSL3. Check the version of node that you are using and adapt accordingly:
   • v17.0.0 and beyond: in frontend/package.json, the "start" script needs to contain the flag --openssl-legacy-provider
   • before v17.0.0: remove the --openssl-legacy-provider flag from the "start" script
2. When starting the MongoDB with mongod, make sure to use the path separators appropriate on your operating system.
3. When using Fedora as your Linux distribution and encountering issues installing mongoDB (student solution):
   1. From https://www.mongodb.com/try/download/community, select RedHat / CentOS 8.0 as platform and download the .rpm file
   2. Go to downloads and execute sudo dnf install <rpm file>
   3. Execute sudo systemctl enable mongod, then sudo systemctl start mongod
   4. Delete the file in /tmp which causes errors when tryng to start a new mongodb instance in a dir with sudo rm /tmp/mongodb-27017.sock in the terminal
   5. Then you can finally start up the database in the data/db directory