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.
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
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):
javacandjava(needed for Java-related graders)xvfb-runandracket(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)
# 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.
- 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
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
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.
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.
To connect Bottlenose to the Orca grading service, two values need to be set:
- Orca's Web API URL should be added to
config/orca.ymlundersite_url->production(see development url in that file for example). - After generating an API key with Orca, that key value should be pasted into
Orca API Keywhen visiting Bottlenose's 'Settings' page. The hostname given to Orca during API key generation should match thesite_urlsetting for Bottlenose.