A homegrown course management system

This repository houses the source code that runs the course management system operated by the student representatives of the computer science department at TU Dresden. It can be used to manage programming courses or pretty much every other event that has a limited number of attendees and should therefore offer a registration.

Technical tidbits

The course system is written in Django and uses the Litera Bootstrap theme.

For more details on the design decisions taken and the general structure of the application, please refer to the design overview.

Setting up a development environment

1. In order to use this project, you need python3 and poetry on your system. Install them via your distribution's package manager.
2. Copy the example configuration and customize it as you see fit:

cp course-management/course/settings.py.example course-management/course/settings.py

3. Install any Python dependencies via poetry install. PostgreSQL support is gated behind a poetry extra. If you need it, run poetry install -E pgsql.
4. Run poetry run course-management/manage.py migrate to apply the database migrations.
5. Run poetry run course-management/manage.py loaddata courses to load a sample data set.
6. Fire up the development server with poetry run course-management/manage.py runserver.
7. You now can login with the super user foo and password bar

Another test user is available by logging in as test: test.

Opening http://[project url]/admin in your browser gives you access to the standard admin interface of Django which you can use to make manual changes to the database.

Using nix

This project's flake provides a devShell that sets up everything for you. Activate it by executing nix develop or using direnv, and the manage.py commands will work as above.

Using Docker

The repository also provides a Dockerfile and docker-compose.yml. Build the container image and start the development server via:

docker compose up --build

The CI workflow automatically publishes the image to the GitHub Container Registry. If you just want to run the prebuilt image, pull it via:

docker pull ghcr.io/<owner>/<repo>:latest

Changing the database model

When changing the database model make sure that the fixture located in course/fixtures/courses.yaml still works. If not, export a new version of the fixture using the command

python manage.py dumpdata --format yaml --exclude contenttypes --output course/fixtures/courses.yaml

It should always include the two aforementioned test users and a set of example courses.

Deployment

To deploy the application in an productive environment, using a SQLite database is discouraged. The amount of concurrent users during registration frequently overwhelms the simplistic architecture and therefore, a MySQL/Postgres database should be preferred. Be sure to change the settings.py configuration accordingly.

Otherwise, just follow steps 1-4 from the checklist above, then follow the standard instructions for deploying a Django application and check the deployment checklist.

Run the poetry run course-management/manage.py createsuperuser command to create a root user for the application to be able to assign administrative privileges to new users. Admin rights may in general only be granted from the http://[site url]/admin page by selecting the appropriate user there and giving them staff/superuser rights.

NixOS module

The NixOS module can be used in a flake like this:

{
  inputs.course-management.url = "github:fsr/course-management";

  outputs = { self, nixpkgs, course-management }: {
    nixosConfigurations.yourhostname = nixpkgs.lib.nixosSystem {
      system = "x86_64-linux";
      modules = [
        ./configuration.nix
        course-management.nixosModules.default
        {
          services.course-management = {
            enable = true;
            hostName = "courses.example.com";
            settings.adminPassFile = "/run/secrets/course-management-adminPass";
            # settings.database = { ... };
            # ...
          };
        }
      ];
    };
  };
}

Nginx will be set up to serve the application on hostName, unless none is configured. Note however that TLS will not be enabled by default and should be configured separately. As explained above, it is recommended to configure a database suited for use in a productive environment. PostgreSQL is supported without further configuration.

If the option is set, a superuser named admin with the password stored in adminPassFile will be created automatically. Alternatively, you can create a superuser using the wrapped manage.py script (as explained above), which is installed to the system environment as cm-manage.

License

This software is licensed with the BSD3 license. See the LICENSE file for more information.