dpc-system - DPC System for Programming Contests and Practicums

Status: The set of files on github is not complete, as it is still in process of making the system open source. If you are interested in using the system, send me an email. It may speed up making it available here.

The system is based on Perl CGI scripts and assumes the Linux environment and file system. It does not use a database system, but instead writes to plain files and creates directories to save data.

Installation

1. The system should be downloaded (git clone is an option) in a directory accessible to the web server. It is assumed that this is a Linux environment with a web server such as Apache or Nginx. The system needs to be able to run Perl CGI scripts, and write to certain directories. Apache can run Perl CGI scripts, while Nginx needs additional software, such as FastCGI. The suEXEC option is the preferable way of running the scripts. This means that the scripts would have the effective userid of the owner of the scripts, so all data could be protected from other users of the system. It is easy to set file permissions in this case since only the owner file permissions should be set. If suEXEC is not available, then a good option is to have the web server userid be in the group which owns the files and the group permissions should be set appropriatelly. As the third option, the files would be all-readable and some all-writable, which is okay only in a one-user system or where all users can be trusted.

2. The system can be cloned in a web server accessible directory such as public_html. Since every competition or practicum should be a subdirectory with the same basic structure, we should clone the system in a directory with a unique name. For example, we can do something like:

    cd ~/public_html
    git clone https://github.com/vkeselj/dpc-system.git 2020-11-03-test
    cd 2020-11-03-test

I use a convention to name the directory as a date of the competition or practicum (with a possible suffix, such as -sample or similar) with possible symbolic links if a short name is preferred for the URL of the site. If we have a local git repository dpc-system.git, we can make a clone with:

    git clone dpc-system.git dpc-2020-11-03-test --branch main --single-branch

3. We cannot access the site immediately because the needed CGI files are not ready in the main directory. Instead, they are in the dpc-software/samples directory. The reason for this is that these files customizable and we want to allow later git pull commands in order to update the DPC System without overwriting these files. For this reason, we need to run the following command the first time the system is created:

   ./dpc-software/bin/dpc-setup-samples
   

This will copy the sample files into the main directory, and set some permissions of the files. If the file is not executable, run it using Perl as: perl dpc-software/bin/dpc-setup-samples

4. There are three files among the sample files that you should edit:

   • configuration.pl - to setup competition URL, name, and other parameters,
   • db/users.db - to modify information about users, and
   • db/passwords - to add some passwords for users The passwords are initially saved in the plain text format. The sample passwords file is randomized to remove a security risk immediatelly after installation.

5. Open the competition URL with your browser and login with the password saved in the db/passwords1 file. You should be able browse the site and see three sample problems. The next issue is setting up the permissions properly for your web site. A script will be added to set the permissions for three options: 1. suEXEC, 2. group access, and 3. all access.

ChangeLog

ChangeLog is kept in the file named ChangeLog.