Bottlenose

Bottlenose is a web app for managing assignment submission and grading in computer science courses. It provides a flexible mechanism for automatic grading of programming assignments.

Development Environment

Bottlenose is built expecting the following environment:

• Ubuntu 16.04 (Note: for settingup Bottlenose on Mac, please go here: setup_mac
• A BTRFS (or ZFS) filesystem for /var
• PostgreSQL
• Ruby + Bundler

For deployment, Phusion Passenger + Nginx is recommended.

Bottlenose Setup

The goal of this section is to have a working web-server running Bottlenose and all of it's dependencies. All scripts in this sections start in the $BOTTLENOSE directory unless explicitly stated otherwise.

Basics

Some packages are generally good to have, and needed by many future steps in the setup process.

sudo apt-get install build-essential git postgresql libpq-dev

Some of the autograders require a synthetic X connection; for that, Bottlenose uses xvfb:

sudo apt-get install xvfb

Postgres

# Switch to the postgres user to create the new bottlenose role.
sudo su - postgres

# Create the bottlenose role for postgres.
createuser -d bottlenose

# Exit back to the vagrant user.
exit

If you run into authentication trouble later, you may need to modify the pg_hba.conf in /etc/postgres/.../ to allow local ident auth.

Database startup for a dev env is:

• As user "postgres":

   createuser -d bottlenose
  

• As the dev user:

 rake db:create
 rake db:schema:load
 rake db:seed

• If you want to start clean on an existing Bottlenose, there's a helper to drop/create/load/seed:

   rake db:nuke
  

Ruby

Best practice for Ruby in development is to use a version manager like rvm or rbenv. Once you have the correct version installed,

# Install Ruby's package manager "Bundler".
gem install bundler

# Install Bottlenose's dependencies.
# (from the bottlenose directory checked out from git)
bundle install

Running Bottlenose

Bottlenose is mostly a standard Rails app.

Currently the bigest weirdness is the use of delayed job.

# Get a fresh database
rails db:create
rails db:migrate

# Start delayed job worker.
bin/delayed_job start [-n #of workers]

# Start the server
rails s

# App should be at localhost:3000, as per usual.

Troubleshooting

Problem 1:

When you run rails db:create, and if you get the following error message:

FATAL:  role "bottlenose" does not exist
Couldn't create database for {"adapter"=>"postgresql", "encoding"=>"unicode", "database"=>"bottlenose_development", "pool"=>5, "username"=>"bottlenose", "password"=>nil}
rake aborted!
ActiveRecord::NoDatabaseError: FATAL:  role "bottlenose" does not exist

You will need to create the user (AKA "role") inside PostgreSQL using psql.exe:

# Start psql.exe
$ psql -d postgres

# Create the user: bottlenose (this should be the application name)
postgres=# create role bottlenose login createdb;

# Quit psql.exe
postgres=# \q

Expect terminal to return:

Created database 'bottlenose_development'
Created database 'bottlenose_test'

Then continue by running rails db:create.