cdebost / zotplan

ZotPlan

ZotPlan is a system designed to help UCI students plan their long-term course selections and checking their plans against course offerings and major requirements.

Getting Started

First-time Setup

1. Download node.js:

   Debian: sudo apt-get install nodejs

   or Mac, Windows: https://nodejs.org/en/

   or using NVM for easy version switching: https://github.com/creationix/nvm

   App tested with node.js v4.8 and npm 2.15.11, should work for any versions.

2. Download mongodb:

   Debian: sudo apt-get install mongodb

   or Mac, Windows:

   1. https://www.mongodb.com/download-center?jmp=homepage#community
   2. mkdir /data/db (default mongodb data directory) if it does not exist
   3. Run monogd

3. Configure database:

   1. Open the mongodb CLI: mongo
   2. Create databases: use zotplan_development;. The development database is needed at minimum for local development, a production database should also be created for running in prod.
   3. Create collections: db.createCollection("courses"), db.createCollection("departments"), db.createCollection("plans"), db.createCollection("users"). Collections are analogous to tables in SQL databases.

4. Install dependencies: Run npm install in the project root.

5. Populate the database with some data:

   1. Add a sample user for testing: mongoimport -d zotplan_development -c users api/tests/datasets/dev-user.json. The user's name is [e-mail], password is password, and has a simple plan built already.
   2. Populate courses and departments data using the webcrawler. The latest legit results of the crawler are stored under source control under crawler/datasets/DATE/. You can generate these results yourself with npm run crawler. Run mongoimport -d zotplan_development -c courses crawler/datasets/*/courses.json to add courses to the db, and mongoimport -d zotplan_development -c departments crawler/datasets/*/departments.json to add departments.

Running the app

Run npm run start:prod to start the server. The app is served at localhost:8000. The server needs to be stopped and rebuilt every time any changes are made.

The default user account is [e-mail], with password password.

To avoid refreshing the server every time a change is made in the UI, you can also run a webpack dev server using npm run start:dev, which will run alongside the localhost:8000 server above. Visit the app at localhost:8080 instead, and UI changes will be reflected without having to restart the server. Any API changes will always require a restart of the prod server.

Testing

Run the api tests using npm test.