rohinb2 / queue

A microservice queue for holding open office hours

Illinois Open Source Queue

A micro-service queue for holding open office hours.

Join the #queue-general channel on the UIUC OSS Slack team to keep up with the queue!

Using the Queue at Illinois

At UIUC, this queue is hosted as a free service by Computer Science and EngrIT.

• View the queue at https://queue.illinois.edu/
• Request to have a queue created for your course by filling out this short form

Contribution Guidelines

• Join the #queue-dev channel on the UIUC OSS Slack team to seek development support
• Claim an issue by commenting on an open issue in order to indicate to others that you are working on the task
• Once you are ready to submit for review make sure to:
  • Include a CHANGELOG.md entry following existing format
  • If making API changes, note the change in API.md
  • If your change requires new dependencies, add them to package.json
  • Tag a lead developer in the reviewers section

If you wish to report a bug, feature request, etc., please open a new issue (first checking that your issue has not already been filed).

Running the Queue from Source

Running locally in dev mode:

• Clone the repository
• Install node and npm
• Install dependencies: npm install in the cloned directory
• Start the server: npm run dev
  • Access the queue from a browser at localhost:3000
  • You can run it on a different port by setting the PORT environment variable

Multiple users in dev mode

In production, all auth is done by Shibboleth, and we just read out of the eppn header to get a student's identity. In dev mode, we still want to be able to test with multiple users (for instance, to assert that user roles work correctly, or to ensue that syncing between multiple clients works correctly). To achieve that, we use express-session to track users across page reloads. By default, you will assume the role of dev, an admin user. To force a different user, you can append ?forceuser=NETID to any URL (this creates a user NETID if needed). All future requests from that browser will be associated with that user, and you can add it to course staff, etc. like a normal user.

To test with multiple users at the same time, you can open up multiple browsers, or use multiple incognito windows.

Production config

Several configuration options are exposed via environment variables:

• PORT: controls which port the app will be served from.
• BASE_URL: allows the app to be served from somewhere other than the server root. This affects asset and API routes, websocket endpoints, generated links, and more. Note that for this to work effectively, the app must still receive the base URL as part of the request; this is important if the app is reverse-proxied behind Apache. For instance, if the queue is served from /my/path/, then you should run with BASE_URL=/my/path (note the lack of trailing slash), and a request for queue 1 should be received as /my/path/queue/1.