psychemedia / ou-tm351

WIP site - issue tracker

ou-tm351

Scribble pad repo for sharing ideas around TM351 course related s/w...

Not for use as part of the course

To install Python packages versioned as for TM351-17J, run:

pip3 install --ignore-installed -r https://raw.githubusercontent.com/psychemedia/ou-tm351/master/tm351_builder_unversioned/versions/pip_freeze_17J.txt

ou-tm351's Issues

Install chardetect commandline tool

The py3 chardet package doesn't seem to install the chardetect command-line command which is part of the py2 package.

May be worth also installing:

pip install chardet

into the py2 environment that is part of the build, which should bring the command line command back in? (Note: we don't make a py2 kernel available for the notebook server.)

Sharing Dropbox / Google Drive folders into the VM

If you add a line into the Vagrantfile just before the provisioner block that runs the mkdir commands:

config.vm.synced_folder "/PATH/ON/HOST", "/vagrant"

you should be able to specify the folder you want to share into the VM. You should create that folder before trying to share it.

To put the new shared directory into effect, reload and reprovision the VM. For example:

vagrant reload --provision

You should put the notebooks into the notebooks folder of that directory.

For example, on a Mac (where ~ is an alias to my home directory), I can create a directory in my dropbox folder ~/Dropbox/TM351VMshare and then map this into the VM using by adding the following line to the Vagrantfile:

config.vm.synced_folder "~/Dropbox/TM351VMshare", "/vagrant"

Note the slight confusion - the shared folder will not now be the folder from which vagrant is run (unless the folder are running from is /PATH/ON/HOST ). The only thing that needs to be in the folder from which vagrant is run is the Vagrantfile and the hidden .vagrant folder that vagrant creates.

Testing frameworks

We need to explore automated test frameworks for checking the TM351 build as per https://github.com/undercertainty/tm351/issues/26 .

The python py.test framework looks appropriate. Need to check things like:

• all python packages installed, eg using https://pypi.python.org/pypi/pytest-reqs
• notebooks run properly: https://github.com/computationalmodelling/nbval
• notebooks running properly also have effect of testing things like connections to databases;
• not sure how to test that maps render properly? eg https://github.com/undercertainty/tm351/issues/51

Running the TM351 environment in a single container

To run the TM351 environment in Binderhub, we need it in a single container.

One of the main questions is, what permissions do we need to set things up under and how do we guarantee that notebook and DBMS servers run appropriately, or how do we endure that the notebook user can start and stop the DBMS servers?

Example Dockerfiles:

• https://github.com/dchud/datamanagement-notebook - and running in Binderhub dchud/datamanagement-notebook#7