mDibyo / berkeley-scheduler

Berkeley Scheduler

Code for berkeleyscheduler.com, a class schedule planner for UC Berkeley students.

Reporting issues

You can report bugs and suggest features on the issues page. Before adding a new issue, check if the issue has already been added. If so, please comment on the existing issue, instead of creating a new one. This will help us a lot in addressing issues.

Contributing

To contribute, take a look at CONTRIBUTING.md.

Setting up the project

Running the website locally

Berkeley Scheduler is a static website. All its functionality is handled in the frontend (on the AngularJS framework). In order to allow the website to be hosted on Github, all compiled resources used by the website must be precompiled and stored alongside the source code. Therefore, running the website locally is as simple as cloning the project and serving it from the filesystem with a static pages server such as python's SimpleHTTPServer.

1. Clone the project.
2. Start up the static pages server from the root of the cloned project directory with python -m SimpleHTTPServer 8421.
3. Visit the website at http://localhost:8421.

Developing on the frontend

As mentioned above, all work on the website is done in Javascript. The code is dependent on a number of libraries available through

1. Install node and npm.
2. Install all dependencies by running npm install in the project directory.
3. To see changes reflected on the website, run gulp in the project directory. This compiles all svg and js sources and stores them in their final location.
4. Before committing, run gulp release, which in addition to compiling svg and js resources, minifies and uglifies the js resources.

Developing on the data pipeline

The class enrollment data on Berkeley Scheduler is obtained from the Student Information Systems (SIS) APIs. The data pipeline (/data) is responsible for fetching and updating this data. It is currently run manually once a day.

An APP_ID and APP_KEY are required for accessing the API. SIS has approved Berkeley Scheduler's request to access the API, and has issued us APP_ID, APP_KEY pairs for the APIs. Any resource requests made to the API for use on Berkeley Scheduler must use these specific pairs. To work on the data pipeline, send an email to [e-mail] stating what you would be using the API for. On receiving the APP_ID and APP_KEY, copy the server/.credentials.tmpl folder to the server/.credentials folder and set the environment variables in the server/.credentials/sis_api.sh file.

Note that access to the APIs is not required for working on the frontend since a set of enrollment data has already been fetched and stored in data/final.

Run the pipeline by running ./run.sh inside the /data directory. The daily runs skip a number of steps, so when running for the first time, set daily to false in ./run.sh.

Note, the finalize step in ./run.sh. This step copies over the processed output from the data/intermediate directory to the data/final directory. Before doing that, it copies the old output in data/final to data/recover. If something goes wrong, and you only realize it after finalize has completed, run ./recover.sh to restore the old output.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank everyone who has contributed to the development of this project, for providing feedback and brainstorming ideas with me.

There are however a few people who have contributed a lot to this project, and I would like to acknowledge them. Mihir Patil, Revati Kapshikhar, Tiffany Qi and Viraj Mahesh: thanks a lot for all the support, the feedback, the help you guys provided to me. Without you guys, this would not have happened.