CodecastTaskBackend

Purpose

This project aims at providing a back-end server that will serve as a companion to the Codecast front-end. The main functionalities provided by this back-end are:

• fetch information about a specific task
• grade a user submission on a task
• save user source code and avancement on a task

It is a complete rewriting in NodeJS/TypeScript of TaskPlatform which had been written in PHP in 2015.

Interactions

The Codecast front-end can interact with this backend through a JSON API with GET or POST methods (see the available routes in src/server.ts).

This back-end can then interact with other back-end servers. In particular, to grade a user submission, this back-end calls the API of the grader queue to run tests on the user submission.

This back-end also interacts with a MySQL database that will store:

• the available tasks that can be solved with Codecast
• the user submissions and the grading of each of the submissions
• the user source codes

The goal is for this database to keep the same structure as the one used by TaskPlatform so that the migration from TaskPlatform to CodecastTaskBackend can be done smoothly.

Development

You need to have NodeJS and Yarn installed on your computer. First, clone this project. Then copy .env file to a .env.local file and fill in your database credentials. Then use:

yarn
yarn dev

Interaction with Algorea Platform

Generate a pair of public/private keys

openssl genrsa -out keys/platform_key.pem 2048
openssl rsa -in keys/platform_key.pem -outform PEM -pubout -out keys/platform_public.pem

And put them in your .env.local file:

• the platform_key.pem in a variable PLATFORM_OWN_PRIVATE_KEY
• the platform_public.pem in a variable PLATFORM_OWN_PUBLIC_KEY

And give your public key to an Algorea platform admin.

Git synchronization

Generate a SSH key

ssh-keygen -t ed25519 -f keys/git_sync -N ""

This key will be used to connect to Git repositories to establish the synchronization. The public key can be added to the deploy keys of the concerned Git repositories.

Testing

To run the Cucumber tests, prepare the testing environment:

1. Create a database task_platform_test
2. Import schema.sql into this database
3. Copy .env to a .env.test file and fill in your database credentials

Then, run:

yarn test

Building

To build a new version of the back-end, use:

yarn build