Code Defenders

This is Code Defenders, a mutation testing game. Publicly available at code-defenders.org.

Installation & Configuration

Software Requirements

Java (Version 8)
Tomcat Server (Version 9)
Apache Maven
Apache Ant
MySQL (e.g. MariaDB)

Setup

This guide assumes:

you are running Debian 10 as OS
you installed all the required software

Modify the configuration

Copy the codedefenders-example.properties file to /var/lib/tomcat9/conf/codedefenders.properties and set the values to match your environment.
The only required value is data.dir, all other properties have sensible default values.

Adapt the systemd service

On Debian 10 tomcat9 by default has only very limited write permissions.
To allow the data.dir to be located outside of the /var/lib/tomcat9/webapps/ folder hierarchie you have to systemctl edit tomcat9 and add the following code:

[Service]
ReadWritePaths="<data.dir path>"

Setup the database

The MySQL or MariaDB database and the user to access the database have to be created before the first run.

Create the data.dir and run the installation script

Create the data.dir folder with the appropriate owner/group and permissions.
CodeDefenders (resp. the tomcat user) requires write permissions to the folder to create missing directories/files and to save the source code files.

To install Code Defenders automatically, execute the setup.sh script under the installation folder with the appropriate user and pass the codedefenders.properties file as input.

cd installation
./setup.sh /var/lib/tomcat9/conf/codedefenders.properties

The script performs a basic availability check of required software. The data directory folder structures created. All the required dependencies and files are automatically downloaded.

If any installation step fails, the installation process aborts and prints an error message.

Note: Depending on the chosen data directory and Tomcat installation in place, root access may be necessary to create required folders. Similarly, additional configurations might be needed. For example, if Tomcat runs under a different user, data directory accesses and ownership might be need to be adjusted.

Note: Code Defenders also requires that its MySQL user owns specific privileges to create databases and tables. Additionally, it requires INDEX privileges, otherwise the installation fails with an error message similar to:

ERROR 1142 (42000) at line 183: INDEX command denied to user

Set up Code Defenders admin users

Code Defenders relies on the Tomcat authentication system to identify admin users, who can access protected pages and customize Code Defenders settings. Access control is enforced through Tomcat using Basic Authentication in the browser. Adding a tomcat admin can be done by applying the manager-gui role to a user.

<role rolename="manager-gui"/>
<user username="<MY_ADMIN_USER>" password="<MY_ADMIN_PWD>" roles="manager-gui"/>

All system configuration and privileged features are accessible for admin users under the /admin page. Configurations are organized in three groups:

Game management: Create bulk games for an entire class, distribute students among the games, and assign roles to students.
User management: Check and update users settings, and forcefully reset passwords.
System settings: Customize technical aspects of Code Defenders and include several advanced settings.

Build and Deployment

For successful deployment, both Tomcat and MySQL services must be running.

Tests can be skipped via -DskipTests
If you want to run the tests be sure the library libncurses.so.5 is present on your system as the database tests depend on it.

For additional information on the system- and integration-tests see the Testing document.

Manual

To deploy you simply need to copy the codedefenders.war file to the tomcat webapps directory, with the context path as name.
E.g to deploy codedefenders at the tomcat root path (http://localhost:8080/) you can simply cp target/codedefenders.war /var/lib/tomcat9/webapps/ROOT.war

You can either download the codedefenders.war file from the latest release or build it yourself with mvn clean package -DskipTests.

Automatic Deployment via Maven

Alternatively you can automatically deploy with maven. For this, Tomcat requires a user with manager-script role, which can be configured in $CATALINA_BASE/conf/tomcat-users.xml (CATALINA_BASE is the Tomcat installation directory).

The maven deployment is configured via a config.properties file. Simply copy the config.properties.example file over and adjust the values to your needs.

<role rolename="manager-script"/>
<user username="<MY_USER>" password="<MY_USER_PASSWORD>" roles="manager-script"/>

Note: This requires the tomcat manager application to be installed, which on Debian is provided by the tomcat9-admin package.

Code Defenders is built and deployed with Maven using the following commands.

mvn clean deploy -DskipTests

vnc10 / CodeDefenders