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Bottlenose · Build Status

Bottlenose is a web app for managing assignment submission and grading in computer science courses. It provides a flexible mechanism for automatic grading of programming assignments.

Development Environment

Bottlenose is built expecting the following environment:

  • Ubuntu 16.04
  • A BTRFS (or ZFS) filesystem for at least /var (although a btrfs root is easiest)
  • PostgreSQL
  • Ruby + Bundler
  • Nodejs + npm

For deployment, Phusion Passenger + Nginx is recommended.

Notes for setting up Bottlenose dev on Mac, please go here: setup_mac

Bottlenose Setup

Basics

First, make sure you have an active software firewall. Beanstalkd is a network service with no authentication, so you want to make sure its port is blocked.

sudo ufw allow 22/tcp
sudo ufw allow 80/tcp
sudo ufw allow 443/tcp
# ... any other external incoming ports
sudo ufw enable

Some packages are generally good to have, and needed by many future steps in the setup process.

sudo apt-get install build-essential git postgresql libpq-dev beanstalkd imagemagick libqt4-dev libqtwebkit-dev pngquant chromium-browser

After installing beanstalkd, double check that "telnet [server] 11300" doesn't work from an external machine. Otherwise you got your firewall wrong.

Some of the autograders (e.g. Racket) require a synthetic X connection; for that, Bottlenose uses xvfb:

sudo apt-get install xvfb

The server will also support converting .rtf files to .pdf files, using LibreOffice:

sudo apt-get install libreoffice-core libreoffice-base

Make certain that the following programs are available in your path (configured in whatever login shell the bottlenose user uses):

  • javac and java (needed for Java-related graders)
  • xvfb-run and racket (needed for Racket autograder)
  • ip, ls, hostname (needed for general configuration)
  • convert (from imagemagick, needed for profile photos)
  • soffice (from libreoffice, needed to convert .rtf to .pdf)

Postgres

# Switch to the postgres user to create the new bottlenose role.
sudo su - postgres

# Create the bottlenose role for postgres.
createuser -d bottlenose

# Exit back to the vagrant user.
exit

If you run into authentication trouble later, you may need to modify the pg_hba.conf in /etc/postgres/.../ to allow local ident auth.

Database startup for a dev env is:

  • As user "postgres": 
     createuser -d bottlenose
  • As the dev user:
 rake db:create
 rake db:schema:load
 rake db:seed
  • If you want to start clean on an existing Bottlenose, there's a helper to drop/create/load/seed: 
     rake db:nuke

Ruby

Best practice for Ruby in development is to use a version manager like rvm or rbenv. Once you have the correct version installed,

# Install Ruby's package manager "Bundler".
gem install bundler

# Install Bottlenose's dependencies.
# (from the bottlenose directory checked out from git)
bundle install
npm install

Running Bottlenose in Development

Bottlenose is mostly a standard Rails app.

# Make sure you've got the database set up.

# Start background task worker
# This'll need a dedicated terminal
rake backburner:work

# Start the server
# This'll also need a dedicated terminal
rails s

# App should be at localhost:3000, as per usual.

Running Bottlenose in Production

Configure nginx with Passenger:

server {
        listen 443 ssl;
        listen [::]:443 ssl;

        server_name <your server name here, e.g. handins.edu>;
        ssl_certificate     /path/to/your/server-cert.cer;
        ssl_certificate_key /path/to/your/private-key.pem;
        ssl_protocols TLSv1 TLSv1.1 TLSv1.2;
        client_max_body_size 10M;

        root /path/to/bottlenose/src/public;

        # First attempt to serve request as file, then
        # as directory, then fall back to displaying a 404.
        try_files $uri @passenger;

        error_page 502 /502.html;

        location @passenger {
            # logic adapted from https://lincolnloop.com/blog/pro-tip-redirecting-custom-nginx-maintenance-page/
            if (-f /path/to/bottlenose/src/public/maintenance.html) {
                return 503;
            }
            passenger_enabled on;
            passenger_ruby /path/to/bottlenose/.rbenv/versions/2.4.1/bin/ruby;
            passenger_sticky_sessions on;
            rails_env production;
        }

        location = /502.html {
            internal;
            root /path/to/bottlenose/src/public/;
        }
        error_page 503 @maintenance;
        location @maintenance {
            root /path/to/bottlenose/src/public/;
            rewrite ^(.*)$ /maintenance.html break;
        }
}

You can then restart the server with

(cd /path/to/bottlenose/src ; bundle exec passenger-config restart-app /path/to/bottlenose/src)

and you can start or restart the background graders with

(cd /path/to/bottlenose/src ; screen -S backburner -X quit ; screen -d -m -S backburner env RAILS_ENV=production bundle exec backburner -l log/backburner.log)

Once the server has been started, go to the Settings > Edit page, ensure that the Site URL is filled in, and click Save Settings.

Utilization with Orca (Production)

To connect Bottlenose to the Orca grading service, two values need to be set:

  1. Orca's Web API URL should be added to config/orca.yml under site_url -> production (see development url in that file for example).
  2. After generating an API key with Orca, that key value should be pasted into Orca API Key when visiting Bottlenose's 'Settings' page. The hostname given to Orca during API key generation should match the site_url setting for Bottlenose.