SIDDATA Backend Server

The joint project for Individualization of Studies through Digital, Data-Driven Assistants (SIDDATA, www.siddata.de) aims to encourage students to define their own study goals and to follow them consistently. The data-driven environment will be able to give hints, reminders and recommendations appropriate to the situation, as well as regarding local and remote courses and Open Educational Resources (OER). This repository contains the code for the backend server which collects, refines and analyses data to generate personalized recommendation.

Environment setup

The Siddata project was developed in two main components: the Django-based backend, and the Stud.IP-integrated frontend. For developing in the backend, you will probably need some frontend to test the backend behavior. The Stud.IP frontend can be found here. Refer to the frontend's documentation for setting it up.

Backend setup

For setting up the backend follow these steps:

1. Clone the repository.
2. Create a virtual python environment with python version 3.7.
3. Install the packages from requirements.txt and requirements-dev.txt.
4. Install PostgreSQL and get your PostgreSQL server running.
5. In PostgreSQL, create a database called "siddata" and a user which has all privileges on that database. This tutorial might help.
6. Create a settings.py file. For that purpose you can just copy the settings_default.py.
7. Fill out your settings.py file:
   • Enter a random secret key for development purposes.
   • Enter allowed hostnames for the development server.
   • Enter your database credentials in DATABASES.
   • If you have a seafile server holding trained models, enter the corresponding credentials in the seafile-model-downloader section. Otherwise, comment out 'apps.bert_app.apps.BertAppConfig' in INSTALLED_APPS.
   • [Optional] If you want to collect udemy courses, create a udemy client and fill the corresponding credentials in MOOC_CLIENTS.
   • [Optional] If you want the email service to work, fill the EMAIL_ variables.
   • [Optional] Enter your name and email address to ADMINS if you want to receive admin reports as emails.
8. Migrate the database:

   python manage.py migrate

9. Run the server and check if everything works:

   python manage.py runserver

10. Create a superuser in order to manage your database via the web interface:

    python manage.py createsuperuser

Troubleshooting:

• If you get an import error, check the content of your settings.BASE_DIR variable. The path has to be like /path/to/your/project/siddata_backend. It has to contain the project directory at the end. If this isn't the case, adjust the setting of BASE_DIR accordingly.

Documentation

Sphinx is used to generate the documentation based on docstrings in the code and .rst files under docs/source. Syntax of the reST syntax used by Sphinx can be found here: https://thomas-cokelaer.info/tutorials/sphinx/rest_syntax.html Sphinx documentation: https://sphinx-rtd-tutorial.readthedocs.io/en/latest/index.html

For generating the HTML documentation with sphinx you first need to follow the steps in the Backend setup section. Then go to the docs directory and run:

make html