Remote Office Hours Queue

The Remote Office Hours Queue application helps users to manage and participate in drop-in office hours virtually or in-person. The application can schedule and link to Zoom and BlueJeans video-conferencing meetings. More information about how the tool works is available on the U-M ITS documentation site.

Getting Started

docker-compose up
docker-compose run --entrypoint="" web python manage.py createsuperuser

Visit localhost:8003/admin in your browser and log in with your admin credentials, then visit localhost:8003 to see the app!

Architectural Overview

We use Django 3 as a backend and React plus TypeScript in the frontend. The frontend is served through django-webpack-loader and integrates with the backend via DRF REST endpoints and Django Channels websockets. Authentication is handled with OIDC via mozilla-django-oidc. The user interface leverages Bootstrap 4 and a React implementation of Bootstrap, react-bootstrap.

Development

Backends

Remote Office Hours Queue currently supports meetings in-person or via Zoom or BlueJeans. These meeting providers -- inperson, zoom, and bluejeans -- are considered backends.

To use or develop with BlueJeans, set BLUEJEANS_CLIENT_ID and BLUEJEANS_CLIENT_SECRET as environment variables.

To use or develop with Zoom, set ZOOM_CLIENT_ID and ZOOM_CLIENT_SECRET as environment variables.

Notifications

SMS notifications for hosts and attendees are provided via Twilio.

To use or develop with SMS notifications, set TWILIO_ACCOUNT_SID, TWILIO_AUTH_TOKEN, and TWILIO_MESSAGING_SERVICE_SID as environment variables. Twilio provides free trial accounts with limited credit. You can use special test credentials to not be charged. You can also test notifications via unit tests, where Twilio is mocked:

docker-compose run web python manage.py test officehours_api.tests.NotificationTestCase

Migrations

If you need to create migrations in the course of development, do it like so:

docker-compose run web python manage.py makemigrations --settings=officehours.makemigrations_settings

This will generate the migrations with all backends enabled as choices.

Using OpenAPI and Swagger

The backend uses the Django REST Framework to build out a REST API. When DEBUG is set to True in Django settings, the application leverages the drf-spectacular library to document existing endpoints and provide for API testing using Swagger.

The Swagger UI can be accessed by navigating to api/schema/swagger-ui. Once on the page, requests can be made against the API using the "Try it out" functionality. The OpenAPI schema can be downloaded as a YAML file from /api/schema.

Google Analytics

This application is capable of being configured to use Google Analytics 4. In order to send events, the environment variable GA_TRACKING_ID needs to be set to your application's measurement ID and the DEBUG environment variable and Django setting need to be off or False. Thus, a deployment environment is currently the simplest place for testing.