GitHub Repo Creator

A microservice that allows students to create a GitHub repository in a course org.

Getting started

• Make sure you have Node and npm installed
• Clone the repository
• Run npm install in the cloned repository

This service uses Shibboleth to identify students. When you're running the service on your own machine, you won't have Shibboleth in front of the app to provide the necessary headers. To provide your Net ID while developing the service, you can provide it via the NETID environment variable. Create a .env file in the root of the repository and add your own NetID:

NETID=mynetid1

The service will load any environment variables from the .env file when it's started up. To start the service, run npm run dev.

Adding courses

Configuration is done with a config.hjson file in the root of the repository. Hjson is an extension to JSON to make it more user-friendly. Specifically, it supports comments, which makes it more suitable for config files. It parses back into JSON for operation.

See the config.sample.hjson file in the root of this repository for an example of a config file. You can copy this into a config.hjson as a starting point for you own config. Note how courses are defined:

• id: short key for the course, used in the URL path
• shortname: the displayed name for the course
• name: descriptive name of the course
• org: the GitHub organization in which to create the repos
• token: the GitHub API token call to use to create the repository.

Other global configs: host: "https://github-enterprise.host.com" // where to send the API calls semester: "Spring 2018" // displayed info about which semester

Other configuration

This service might not be mounted at the root path of the server. If that's the case, you can set the BASE_URL environment variable. For example, if this service was being served from /github, you could use BASE_URL=/github.

Deploying this service

The easiest way to deploy this service is with docker-compose. The included docker-compose.yml will mount your config.hjson file into the container, load any environment variables from your .env file, bind the host port from the PORT environment variable to the appropriate port in the container, and start the container. For example, to serve the app on port 12345, you could run:

PORT=12345 docker-compose start