saaemm/course-tool

Course Tool

CMU Courses

CMU Courses (AKA ScottyLabs Course Tool) is a web application designed to aid students at Carnegie Mellon University in browsing courses, including information about course evaluations and schedules. It is actively maintained by ScottyLabs.

This is the second iteration of the Course Tool. The second version is a rewrite of the frontend and backend, with the inclusion of new features (currently a work-in-progress) such as:

• Search
• Filters
• Professor Search
• Schedule Creation

This new version is currently deployed at cmucourses.com. This project is currently undergoing development, so expect large changes to the codebase and features to be unstable.

Getting Started

To get started, run npm install in both the frontend and backend folders.

Also, we use Doppler to populate the environment with the necessary secrets to access the database. Follow the instructions here to install the Doppler CLI. Run doppler setup in the parent folder to set this up.

Frontend

To run the frontend in development mode:

cd frontend
npm run dev

This runs the frontend at http://localhost:3010. It also watches for changes and reloads when a file is saved.

To build and deploy the frontend, instead run:

npm run build
npm run start

Backend

To run the backend in development mode:

cd backend
npm run dev

The backend should now be serving requests at http://localhost:3000.

To deploy the backend, run

npm run start

Scrapers

More information about the scrapers used to collect the data may be found at this repo.

Technologies

The Course Tool is built with several technologies.

• The frontend is built using NextJS and React, Redux, Typescript and TailwindCSS.
• The backend uses Express, MongoDB and JS.
• The scrapers are written in JS.