Test My Code server

Test My Code ("TMC") is a tool to automate most of the exercise checking when teaching programming. It runs code submitted by students, gives feedback if tests fail and maintains a scoreboard. This allows for lots of small exercises without the need for course instructors to manually go through all of them.

The system has been used with great success by the University of Helsinki CS Dept. in several elementary programming and data structures courses with hundreds of users.

Setup

Very rough setup instructions below.

System Dependencies

The following programs should be installed first: git, zip, unzip, convert (from ImageMagick), javac, java, ant, mvn, gcc, make and bc.

For the testing environment you need the following: phantomjs.

PhantomJS (at least version 1.8.1) is required by Poltergeist gem to run headless browser tests. See poltergeist for documentation. For installing PhantomJS, see http://phantomjs.org.

An X server is currently needed for browser tests to pass when using Selenium. Xvfb will do, but remember to set your DISPLAY.

Setup

We assume you use RVM. If you don't, then replace rvmsudo with sudo below. (note: RVM 1.17.x may have some problems with rvmsudo)

1. Download submodules with git submodule update --init --recursive
2. Install dependencies with gem install bundler && bundle install
3. Edit config/site.yml based on config/site.defaults.yml.
4. Install PostgreSQL 9.2+. See config/database.yml for database settings.
5. Initialize the database with env RAILS_ENV=production rake db:reset
6. Precompile assets with env RAILS_ENV=production rake assets:precompile
7. Go to ext/tmc-sandbox and compile it with sudo make. See its readme for dependencies.
8. Go to ext/tmc-sandbox/web and install dependencies with bundle install. Compile extensions with rake ext and run tests with rvmsudo rake test.
9. Compile the other stuff in ext by doing rake compile.
10. Install tmc-check by running rvmsudo make rubygems install clean in its directory.
11. Run the test suite with rvmsudo rake spec.
12. Get pghero stats enabled, add to postgresql.conf following lines shared_preload_libraries = 'pg_stat_statements' pg_stat_statements.track = all

After you get the test suite to pass, you can set up background services.

1. Recheck your comet server config in site.yml and then do rvmsudo rake comet:config:update.
2. Install init scripts: rvmsudo rake comet:init:install, rvmsudo rake background_daemon:init:install.
3. Start the services: sudo /etc/init.d/tmc-comet start, sudo /etc/init.d/tmc-background-daemon start.
4. If you use Apache, then make sure public/ and tmp/ are readable and install mod_xsendfile. Configure XSendFilePath to the tmp/cache directory of the application.

The application should not be deployed into a multithreaded server! It often changes the current working directory, which is a process-specific attribute. Each request should have its process all to itself. If you use Apache with, say, Passenger, then use the prefork MPM.

Startup

1. rails server or some other RoR setup.
2. Go to ext/tmc-sandbox/web and do rackup --port 3001 or some other Rack setup.
3. rake dev:comet:run
4. script/background_daemon start

Alternatively use script/dev_env to do all of the above in screen.

The default user account is admin/admin.

Production setup

1. Run rvmsudo rake init:install to install the init script for the submission rerunner.
2. Do the same in ext/tmc-sandbox/web to install the init script for the sandbox.

Credits

Current maintainers of the project are

• Martin Pärtel (mpartel)
• Jarmo Isotalo (jamox)

The project started as a Software Engineering Lab project at the University of Helsinki CS Dept. but has since been gradually almost completely rewritten. The original authors of the server component were

• Patrik Marjanen
• Jarno Mynttinen
• Martti Rannanjärvi (mrannanj)
• Katri Rantanen

Another team wrote a NetBeans plugin for the system.

The course instructor and current maintainer of the project is Martin Pärtel (mpartel). Other closely involved instructors were

• Matti Luukkainen (mluukkai)
• Antti Laaksonen
• Arto Vihavainen
• Jaakko Kurhila

The system was improved and C language support was added in another SE lab project by

• Jarmo Isotalo (jamox)
• Tony Kovanen (rase-)
• Kalle Viiri (Kviiri)

Checkstyle-support was integrated by

• Kenny Heinonen (kennyhei)
• Kasper Hirvikoski (kasper)
• Jarmo Isotalo (jamox)
• Joni Salmi (josalmi)

License

GPLv2