Genie

Genie is an experimental platform for educators to publish and maintain lessons using Git hooks. It allows authors to describe problems using YAML and Markdown, and also tracks each student's performance.

The project was started in Jan 2013 and paused on July 2013.

Components include:

• genie-game, the Rails front-end
• genie-compiler, a Thrift RPC service that clones and compiles lessons
• genie-parser, an extension of Redcarpet that parses lessons
• genie-tangle, a SSH proxy and VM pool manager

Configuration

Configuration options are available in lib/lamp/config.rb.

Usage

To get a list of all commands and their options, use

$ lamp help

To start the service, on an OS-selected port, use

$ lamp server

To start the client, use

$ lamp client --port=PORT COMMAND

If command is not provided, a pry console will be launched. For example,

$ bin/lamp client --port=12345
[1] pry(#<Tangle::Client>)> info
=> <LampInfo uptime: ..., threads: ...>

Workflow

All of these operations begin with obtaining a lock (at {ROOT}/locks/{LESSON_PATH}) and end with releasing the lock.

Create Lesson

Creates a lesson from the git repository at the given URL.

create(git_url, lesson_path, branch = 'master')

Does a clone followed by compile. In addition, the {ROOT}/source/{LESSON_PATH} directory is deleted after it's done.

Delete Lesson

Removes the {ROOT}/source/{LESSON_PATH} and {ROOT}/compiled/{LESSON_PATH} directories.

$> lamp rm LESSON_PATH

Output

For lesson jimjh/floating-point, the output directory contains the following:

root/                                drwxr-xr-x
  |- compiled/                       drwxr-xr-x
    |- jimjh/                        drwxr-xr-x
      |- floating-point/             drwxr-xr-x
        |- manifest.json              rw-r--r--
        |- index.inc                  rw-r--r--
        |- images/                   drwxr-xr-x
        |- ...
  |- lock/                           drwx------
    |- jimjh/                        drwx------
      |- floating-point/             drwx------
        |- lamp.lock                  rw-------
  |- source/                         drwx------
    |- jimjh/                        drwx------
      |- floating-point/             drwx------
        |- manifest.json
        |- index.md
        |- images/
        |- ...
  |- solution/                       drwxr-x---
    |- jimjh/                        drwxr-x---
      |- floating-point/             drwxr-x---
        |- 0.sol                      rw-r-----
        |- 1.sol                      rw-r-----
        |- ...

The *.inc files in compiled/:user/:lesson are considered to be sanitized and safe for embedding on a HTML page. The manifest.json file is copied directly from the user, and may contain malicious strings. The other files in the static files are considered dangerous and may only be served as attachments or images.