Coursetable

Coursetable is made of two big parts:

1. Website: The site you see when you go to coursetable.com. The code for this – the front-end site as well as the various back-end scripts that handle user actions – is contained within this repository.
2. Crawler: The scripts behind the scenes that actually get all the data from Yale’s websites. The code for this is in our ferry repository.

Design:

The various functions of the website are compartmentalized as follows:

• /api: An Express server for back-end logic going forward. Currently handles user challenges.
• /dev_proxy: Proxy configuration for relaying connections between services (e.g. authentication headers, CAS cookies, etc.)
• /docker: Configuration files for running everything together in Docker.
• /frontend: The current face of the site, built in React.
• /sysadmin: Administrative tools such as phpMyAdmin.
• /web: Older PHP scripts migrated from the legacy site.

How to develop

The latest development instructions are now maintained in a Google Doc called the CourseTable development guide.

The document includes instructions on how to:

1. Set up the dev environment
2. Learn about the code
3. Make your first changes

Workflow

Contributing code:

1. Create a branch for your feature. This can usually be done with git checkout -b <username>/<feature_name>
2. make changes.
3. Create some commits and push your changes to the origin.
4. Create a pull request and add a few reviewers. In the pull request, be sure to reference any relevant issue numbers.
5. Once the pull request has been approved, merge it into the master branch.

Issues:

We use GitHub issues to track bugs and feature requests: https://github.com/coursetable/coursetable/issues.

Style

For different languages:

• JavaScript: We use prettier to automatically format the code. Make sure you use your editor's integration!
• PHP: We use PHP CodeSniffer to maintain coding standards; generally, it's 4 spaces for tabs, camelCase for variables, and follow whatever else that's in use right now.

We have automated checks set up that will run for every commit and pull request.

(Mostly for Peter and Harry) Steps for rolling out a new server

1. Create a SSH key, and add it as a deploy key for both this repository and install-scripts.
2. Run cd /home/web && git clone git@gitlab.com:myrtlelime/coursetable.git app
3. Run install.sh
4. Run components/gencerts.sh to generate certificates if needed
5. Load the database locally, if needed
6. Run finish-install.sh

To rebuild JS on main site

Check out How to deploy

Steps for setting up debugging on Windows

1. Change web/includes/ProjectCommon.php to point to a remote database
2. Run composer install in web/libs and in crawler
3. In your php.ini, make sure cURL, MySQLi, SQLite3 are enabled
4. Run php Build.php in web/tools
5. Run php RegenerateDataFiles.php in crawler to either generate the JSON locally

Debugging Tips

Fatal error: Uncaught SmartyException: unable to write file [...]: execute chmod -R 777 web/gen in your terminal.