coursetable/coursetable

Code powering the CourseTable website

Coursetable

Coursetable is made of two big parts:

1. Website: The site you see when you go to coursetable.com. The code for this – the front-end site as well as the back-end server that handle user actions – is contained within this repository.
2. Crawler: The scripts behind the scenes that actually get all the data from Yale’s websites. The code for this is in our ferry repository.

Repository Layout

The various functions of the website are compartmentalized as follows:

• /api: Source code for API server with Docker Compose configuration for backend logic.
• /frontend: The current face of the site, built with React.

How to develop

Check out our contributing guide.

How to deploy

Deployments are automatically handled via GitHub Actions workflows. If necessary, you can also manually deploy. For all instructions relevant to deploying our code, see docs/deployment.md.

coursetable's Issues

Add crawler as a non-public submodule

See #18 for motivation.

For classes that have run longer than X amount of terms with a specific prof, use only the last X terms to calculate rating/workload

In GitLab by @nmk38 on Aug 5, 2019, 14:41

Purge old branches

Remove all the old branches.

Enable search from timetable view

In GitLab by @ErikBoesen on Sep 12, 2019, 13:47

Outdated Yaleplus name used in Facebook hover text

In GitLab by @ErikBoesen on Sep 12, 2019, 08:18

Rewrite crawler

In GitLab by @hsheth2 on Sep 7, 2019, 12:57

Currently the crawler and web portions use the same instance of MySQL. Ideally, they should use different instances and operate more independently of each other.

Improve mobile view

In GitLab by @nmk38 on Aug 2, 2019, 17:31

Add more descriptors to timetable courses checklist

In GitLab by @k3vnchen on Sep 23, 2019, 14:22

The course checklist in the timetable view has only the course title; courses with multiple sections appear as multiple identical list items with no differentiation. We should add the course section or descriptors with meeting time/professor.

Facebook Integration Bug Fix

In GitLab by @JunKwak on Aug 31, 2019, 09:41

null

Move to boostrap 4

Stop using bootstrap 2.3.2.

Alert user if course overlaps with current worksheet

In GitLab by @maxyuan6717 on Sep 23, 2019, 14:19

Whether it's an additional column or symbol next to the course.

Replace Yaleplus name with CourseTable in Facebook tooltip !5 - [merged]

In GitLab by @ErikBoesen on Sep 12, 2019, 08:18

Merges remove-yaleplus -> master

Fix #17

Set up a staging server

In GitLab by @hsheth2 on Sep 5, 2019, 20:44

A staging server, which deploys on a schedule (daily from the master branch?), would facilitate more ambitious changes without worry of breaking the main CourseTable site.

Replace Yaleplus name with CourseTable in Facebook tooltip !5 - [merged]

In GitLab by @ErikBoesen on Sep 12, 2019, 08:18

Merges remove-yaleplus -> master

Fix #17

Show what subject area abbreviations mean

In GitLab by @ErikBoesen on Sep 23, 2019, 14:35

As far as I can see there is no way to see what various abbreviations (for example "BIS" or "CPSC") mean if you don't already know.

BIS -> Biostatistics
CPSC -> Computer Science

Fixed `npm install` in docker, updated insecure packages !6 - [merged]

In GitLab by @hsource on Sep 14, 2019, 01:26

Merges harry/docker-npm-audit -> master

npm install by default implicitly checks whether any packages have security vulnerabilities, and fails to install if that's the case. This change:

1. Fixes the security vulnerabilities
2. Makes npm install run via the npm run install-and-watch continue even if there are security vulnerabilities

For reference: this is the problem we'd run into before this change.

/var/www/html # npm install
npm WARN [email protected] requires a peer of acorn@^6.0.0 but none is installed. You must install peer dependencies yourself.
npm WARN [email protected] requires a peer of ajv@^6.9.1 but none is installed. You must install peer dependencies yourself.
npm WARN [email protected] requires a peer of eslint@>= 4.12.1 but none is installed. You must install peer dependencies yourself.

audited 40049 packages in 25.132s
found 1209 vulnerabilities (1 moderate, 1208 high)
  run `npm audit fix` to fix them, or `npm audit` for details

Fixed `npm install` in docker, updated insecure packages !6 - [merged]

In GitLab by @hsource on Sep 14, 2019, 01:26

Merges harry/docker-npm-audit -> master

npm install by default implicitly checks whether any packages have security vulnerabilities, and fails to install if that's the case. This change:

1. Fixes the security vulnerabilities
2. Makes npm install run via the npm run install-and-watch continue even if there are security vulnerabilities

For reference: this is the problem we'd run into before this change.

/var/www/html # npm install
npm WARN [email protected] requires a peer of acorn@^6.0.0 but none is installed. You must install peer dependencies yourself.
npm WARN [email protected] requires a peer of ajv@^6.9.1 but none is installed. You must install peer dependencies yourself.
npm WARN [email protected] requires a peer of eslint@>= 4.12.1 but none is installed. You must install peer dependencies yourself.

audited 40049 packages in 25.132s
found 1209 vulnerabilities (1 moderate, 1208 high)
  run `npm audit fix` to fix them, or `npm audit` for details

Integrate with the course demand statistics provided by Yale

In GitLab by @hsheth2 on Sep 5, 2019, 20:32

At first, this integration can be a simple link to the Course Demand Statistics (CDS) website. Those links should be fairly easy to generate: https://ivy.yale.edu/course-stats/course/courseDetail?termCode=201901&courseNumbers=CPSC+235%2FEENG+245&subjectCode=CPSC

Afterwards, we might want to think about integrating the graphs from CDS directly into CourseTable.

Set up dev environment

In GitLab by @JunKwak on Aug 31, 2019, 09:41

null

Export course worksheet to ICS

In GitLab by @hsheth2 on Sep 5, 2019, 20:49

This could be used to add a calendar subscription which directly adds course times, dates, etc. to a calendar (e.g. Google Calendar) via a live ICS feed.

Remove and reset FB app secret

It probably shouldn't be in plaintext.

Remove vendored JS libraries

Rather than vendoring old versions of JS libraries in web/libs, we should instead link to a CDN. Something like jsDelivr might be good.

Replace Yaleplus name with CourseTable in Facebook tooltip !5 - [merged]

In GitLab by @ErikBoesen on Sep 12, 2019, 08:18

Merges remove-yaleplus -> master

Fix #17

Moving to open source on GitHub

In GitLab by @hsheth2 on Sep 12, 2019, 17:54

We would like to eventually move to GitHub, and make the repo public.

Before doing so, we need to make sure that all secrets are purged from the repo and git history.

Centralize Logging Infrastructure

In GitLab by @hsheth2 on Sep 5, 2019, 20:36

Currently we use a home-grown PHP logging framework. It would be nice to transition to a standard and well-supported logging library instead.

Once this transition is done, it might enable us to use a better, more centralized logging mechanism and set up alerting for issues.

Transition to React

In GitLab by @hsheth2 on Sep 5, 2019, 20:34

This is a tracking issue for the migration to React.

It is not urgent.

Course recommendation system

In GitLab by @hsheth2 on Sep 6, 2019, 22:48

It would probably be fairly easy to build a rudimentary recommender system to suggest classes that people with similar interests have also taken.

Hide "enable evaluation" button if already enabled

Hide Facebook column when Facebook not connected

In GitLab by @ErikBoesen on Sep 14, 2019, 09:08

Need to think through whether this is a good idea.

Prune/manage vendored PHP libraries

Most of our PHP libraries are currently located in the web/libs directory. A fair number of them appear to be unused or very lightly used (e.g. swift). These we should remove. For the rest of the libraries (e.g. smarty, CAS), we should start bundling them via Composer when possible.

TestProjectCommon test should not be available on coursetable.com

Increase size of course name column and text width

In GitLab by @hsheth2 on Sep 6, 2019, 22:47

It would be nice to be able to resize the columns, and have those settings persist within or across sessions.

Fixed `npm install` in docker, updated insecure packages !6 - [merged]

In GitLab by @hsource on Sep 14, 2019, 01:26

Merges harry/docker-npm-audit -> master

npm install by default implicitly checks whether any packages have security vulnerabilities, and fails to install if that's the case. This change:

1. Fixes the security vulnerabilities
2. Makes npm install run via the npm run install-and-watch continue even if there are security vulnerabilities

For reference: this is the problem we'd run into before this change.

/var/www/html # npm install
npm WARN [email protected] requires a peer of acorn@^6.0.0 but none is installed. You must install peer dependencies yourself.
npm WARN [email protected] requires a peer of ajv@^6.9.1 but none is installed. You must install peer dependencies yourself.
npm WARN [email protected] requires a peer of eslint@>= 4.12.1 but none is installed. You must install peer dependencies yourself.

audited 40049 packages in 25.132s
found 1209 vulnerabilities (1 moderate, 1208 high)
  run `npm audit fix` to fix them, or `npm audit` for details

Fixed `npm install` in docker, updated insecure packages !6 - [merged]

In GitLab by @hsource on Sep 14, 2019, 01:26

Merges harry/docker-npm-audit -> master

npm install by default implicitly checks whether any packages have security vulnerabilities, and fails to install if that's the case. This change:

1. Fixes the security vulnerabilities
2. Makes npm install run via the npm run install-and-watch continue even if there are security vulnerabilities

For reference: this is the problem we'd run into before this change.

/var/www/html # npm install
npm WARN [email protected] requires a peer of acorn@^6.0.0 but none is installed. You must install peer dependencies yourself.
npm WARN [email protected] requires a peer of ajv@^6.9.1 but none is installed. You must install peer dependencies yourself.
npm WARN [email protected] requires a peer of eslint@>= 4.12.1 but none is installed. You must install peer dependencies yourself.

audited 40049 packages in 25.132s
found 1209 vulnerabilities (1 moderate, 1208 high)
  run `npm audit fix` to fix them, or `npm audit` for details

Worksheet list/timetable should refresh automatically

In GitLab by @ErikBoesen on Sep 12, 2019, 12:13

While using the worksheet list/timetable view this semester, I found myself getting pestered by the way that when I removed an item from my worksheet, I had to refresh or go to another panel then return to the calendar before that course would disappear from the sheet. I think this should occur automatically.

Change contact Info for user feedback to <[email protected]>

In GitLab by @codyjlin on Sep 19, 2019, 19:07

Recently created an elilist email for Coursetable developers to receive and respond to user feedback.

CourseTable Feedback [email protected]

Give access to Coursetable server for deploying

• Add an easy, preferably one-button way to deploy latest changes
• Give SSH access to at least a few group members for debugging production issues

Filesystem reorganization

• Delete unused TPL files
• Remove unused directories/files
• #57
• gen directory should be separated to different directories. Smarty templates should be somewhere else, js may not be in use so we should research this, and json should be shared between crawler and web and should be accessible to the filesystem from PHP but not publicly-facing through CourseTable.com. Could solve this with .htaccess file or move it somewhere else and have PHP retrieve it, wherein you'd lose static serving. gen directory should itself disappear eventually.

Docker development requires 777 permissions

In GitLab by @hsheth2 on Sep 5, 2019, 20:26

UI: Sync changes between cross-listed courses

In GitLab by @hsheth2 on Sep 5, 2019, 20:30

For example, assume a class is listed as both CPSC 235 and EENG 245. If a user adds CPSC 235 to their worksheet, then the EENG 245 entry should indicate that it was already added via a cross listing.

How exactly this should behave is still up for debate. It's also unclear if this would require any changes to the backend.

Update CourseTable Intro page and "About CourseTable" to credit YCS

Course description hover gets cut off

When hovering over the titles of courses in the table, the boxes that show up for the top ~6 entries get cut off. (This is pretty low priority but just wanted to make a note of it.)

Remove "Row" column

In GitLab by @ErikBoesen on Sep 23, 2019, 14:17

Or at least think about doing so. Not clear how it really helps.

Clone submodules in CI

Although the crawler is not public, for now we may want to clone it during CI. See https://docs.travis-ci.com/user/private-dependencies/. For context, see #47.

Transition to an Express/NodeJS backend

In GitLab by @hsheth2 on Sep 5, 2019, 20:34

This is a tracking issue.

It is not urgent.

Remove SwiftMailer

We aren't using it anymore. Part of #53.

Unit Tests

In GitLab by @hsheth2 on Sep 5, 2019, 20:38

This is a tracking issue for all unit testing endeavors.

Ideally, we would like to add tests for all parts of the system. Given the tight coupling of the view and presenter, this will be tough right now.

Enforce formatting via CI

Building on #16, I'd like to format all of our code (JS, CSS, HTML, etc) in addition to PHP, which was done by #47.

Continous integration setup

In GitLab by @hsheth2 on Sep 12, 2019, 13:00

Once we have some tests set up, we should have a CI pipeline to validate all commits and pull requests.

Replace Yaleplus name with CourseTable in Facebook tooltip !5 - [merged]

In GitLab by @ErikBoesen on Sep 12, 2019, 08:18

Merges remove-yaleplus -> master

Fix #17