adzienis/oh-queuing

Root repository consisting of dev-opsy stuff for the OH server.

Summary

This is the root repository for OH-Queuing. This project consists of the OH-Queuing-Server repository. See the accompanying repository to get more detailed information about the server, and development there.

This is a Ruby on Rails powered office hours queue. This is the continuation of a pre-existing office hours queue for CMQueue that was written primarily with Node.js, and React. The website allows multiple courses to create and manage their office hours queues. The main motivation of this project is to allow better insight and transparency with the analysis of office hours. To that end, the "queue" is built with many features in order to better track and augment office hours.

Features

1. A traditional office hours queue, where students can ask questions, and TA's can answer them.

2. Tracking entire life cycle of question (when it was created, when/why was it frozen, split/categorize questions based on content).

3. Summarize data from across entire semesters/multiple courses.

4. REST based API to allow course authorized applications to access data to enable further, independent features.

5. Course management of semesters, roles, rosters, tags, and questions.

6. Importing and exporting data from CSV files.

7. Ability for students, and TA's to review their own questions/interactions from across courses/semesters.

Motivation

The goal is to have a website, that doesn't necessarily do everything, but has enough features for us to pull out information to summarize office hours performance (and hopefully try to make 90 student long office hours not so unbearable for everyone). The website has some basic course management, with an emphasis on being able to export the data through the REST API or manually, to perform more analytics somewhere else.

Currently, very general insight on course performance comes from an integration with Metabase, which gives a pretty good "no-code" solution to interpreting the data, but it is still general, and its probably better to get more specific information.

Future Features

• While the REST API exists with a large number of endpoints, it would be interesting to have it entirely fleshed out so that it is possible to get a large amount of functionality through separate applications (maybe overzealous, but to enable the development of an app).

• Flesh out both course and user settings.

• Currently, to manage multiple courses, they are all separated out by explicit endpoints (must go to ...courses/1/questions to get questions for a particular course, even if you manage multiple courses). Possibly may look into hotwire to get this working, but it would be interesting to see if it can be done with just passing an array of course id's into the url (so it would be ...courses/questions?course_ids=[1,2])

• Flesh out analytics: the data is there, and there are sections in the code for embedding external graphs. But not sure whether it would be better to spend effort on statistics on the site, vs investing time into a proper analytics tool (PowerBI/Excel sheets?).

Developing

This repository consists of a Makefile and a set of docker-compose files to help set everything up. Nginx is used as the reverse proxy. Each environment consists of a set of Docker containers.

Make sure to clone this repo with git clone --recurse-submodules since the actual server is in the OH-Queuing-Server

Before running any of these, cd into OH-Queuing-Server, and run bundle install (possibly bundle install --path vendor to keep dependencies local in the directory).

Development

Some ports are exposed in the containers to help with connecting to the server/also debugging.

To build: make build_dev
To run: make run_dev
To bring down: make down_dev
To run the console: make console_dev

The server itself is not in a container (yet). Therefore, to run it, enter: make server_dev

Testing

Tests are in minitest, and should be more fleshed out.

To build: make build_test
To run: make run_test
To bring down: make down_test

Production

All ports are blocked. To configure anything/reset anything, you should directly run docker exec commands/use the Makefile.

There is a public certificate, and encrypted private key to handle SSL. The private key has been encrypted with:

openssl enc -in private.key \
    -pbkdf2 \
    -pass stdin > private.key.enc

For Nginx, to run correctly, make sure that you have a .env file with the contents:

PRIVATE_KEY_PASS="password"

Where "password" is for descryption.

To build: make build_prod
To run: make run_prod
To bring down: make down_prod
To run the console: make console_prod