Introduction

Coursemology, an open source online education platform for schools :-)

Quick Start

To get started, you will need to do the following:

1. Clone the repository
2. Create a Facebook app and retrieve its App ID and App secret
3. Install rvm and install ruby 1.9.3
4. Install mysql

Setting up

$ cp sample_config/facebook.yml.sample config/facebook.yml
# Edit the file to use your own Facebook App ID and secret

$ cp sample_config/devise_initializer.rb.sample config/initializers/devise.rb
# Edit the file (mailer_sender, omniauth)

$ cp config/database.yml.sample config/database.yml
# Change the username and password in the development section as appropriate

# Set 2 environment variables: GMAIL_SMTP_USER and GMAIL_SMTP_PASSWORD
# either just run this commands or add them into a .rvmrc file
$ export GMAIL_SMTP_USER='[email protected]'
$ export GMAIL_SMTP_PASSWORD='your_password'

$ bundle install
$ rake db:create # Do it for the first time
$ rake db:schema:load
$ rake db:seed
$ rake db:populate_course_pref
$ rake db:gen_fake_data # Creates sample courses & users for you, takes a few minutes

# The app performance can be monitored by adding newrelic config file:
# config/newrelic.yml

clockwork and delayed_job

Coursemology has got various tasks that need to be run at various intervals; the clockwork and delayed_job gems are used for this purpose. These need setting up to run alongside your application instance.

Run these tasks from your source checkout directory when your application is launched

$ script/delayed_job start
$ clockworkd -c lib/clock.rb --pid-dir=tmp/pids start

To terminate them (for upgrading or reloading)

$ script/delayed_job stop
$ clockworkd -c lib/clock.rb --pid-dir=tmp/pids stop

Testing on your local machine

One Superuser is added during rake db:seed.

username: [email protected]
password: supersecretpass

The application can be started using rails server (using WeBrick) or puma (recommended for parallelisation.)

Checking available API / routes:

$ rake routes

Production builds

Coursemology utilises the Rails assets pipeline. Also, changes might require schema migrations. Run them all on your deployment servers using the following comments

$ rake db:migrate db:seed db:populate_course_pref
$ rake tmp:cache:clear assets:clean:all assets:precompile:all

Deploying Rails apps with Phusion Messenger

In case you are trying to deploy the website yourself using Passenger (aka mod_rails), here is a good guide to get started:

http://www.web-l.nl/posts/5

Windows Specific

If you are deploying/developing on Windows, you will need to compile some gems from source using the Ruby DevKit. The following gems require special attention:

• mysql2 requires the MySQL C Connector to be present. Specify the path when installing the gem using gem install mysql2 --version 0.3.13 -- --with-mysql-dir=.\mysql-connector-c-6.1.3-win32
• Puma requires additional build resources not found within the DevKit. Notably, OpenSSL is missing. Obtain OpenSSL from the URL within the ticket and recompile.

Furthermore, it is good to have Node.js installed for the assets pipeline to work. In theory, the asset pipeline can work with cscript, but it is known to not produce any output at least on Windows 8.1.

Third party libraries

You should skim through the README of these following gems to get a gist of how they work.

• Authentication: Devise
• Authorization: CanCan
• Front-end Framework/library: Bootstrap and bootstrap-sass
• File upload: Paperclip (Very easy to use)
• Icon: Font Awesome and font-awesome-sass-rails
• Datepicker: Bootstrap Datepicker for Rails