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WeBWorK 3

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WeBWorK3 is the next generation of WeBWorK, an online open-source homework system. This version is a complete rewrite of the webwork2 system using more modern database, backend and UI frameworks, described below.

There are three main parts of this repository:

  • webwork-db: basic functionality (database and other utils)
  • webwork-mojo: mojolicious server backend to handle api requests.
  • webwork-front-end: new webwork interface.

webwork-db

This is code to handle a new database structure for webwork and other utilities needed for non-gui webwork functionality.

See docs/db.md for more information on the database.

webwork-mojo

We use Mojolicious to handle the webservices. These include some basic webpages for accessing, but more-importantly a CRUD api webservice for interacting at a service level to webwork.

webwork-front-end

The front end/client side of webwork uses quasar, a highly flexible set of interactice web components used with VueJS. The result is a Single Page Application (SPA) that runs extremely fast in that most of the client-side code is loaded at the beginning and only small api webservice requests are made and often handled in the background.

Getting Started

The current version of this is for DEVELOPMENT ONLY and used as a proof of concept. All of the instructions below are assuming terminal/shell commands.

Getting the webwork3 code

  1. Clone the webwork3 code with git clone https://github.com/openwebwork/webwork3.git
  2. Change directory to the webwork3 directory: cd webwork3
  3. Copy conf/webwork3.dist.yml to conf/webwork3.yml and modify it appropriately if needed.

Download Quasar

  1. Make sure that node and npm are installed.
  2. Install the Quasar cli using: npm install -g @quasar/cli

Getting Mojolicious and other needed packages

  1. Make sure that you have perl (at least version 5.20) installed.
  2. Install cpanm from perl and install Mojolicious with cpanm Mojolicious. A one-liner install is available at the Mojolicious homepage.
  3. Start mojolicious (from the webwork3 directory) with morbo bin/webwork3.
  4. Note if there are missing perl packages, it will let you know and you can install those with cpanm. Also, there may missing plugins, like DBIC. Any Mojolicious plugins have a prefix of Mojolicious::Plugin, so to install the DBIC plugin, enter cpanm Mojolicious::Plugin::DBIC
  5. If you get the message Web application available at http://127.0.0.1:3000 then mojolicious is running and waiting for any requests.

Getting the standalone renderer code running

  1. Clone the repository with git clone --recursive https://github.com/openwebwork/renderer

  2. copy render_app.conf.dist to render_app.conf and make any desired modifications including changing the ports from 3000 to 3001

  3. install other dependencies a. cd lib/WeBWorK/htdocs b. npm install

  4. Either install the webwork open problem library or link to a current one with a. change to the top directory of the renderer b. ln -s PATH_TO_OPL (end with webwork-open-problem-library)

  5. Start the standalone server with morbo -l "http://*:3001" script/render_app

Creating some fake data

There is some fake data to get started with so there are a few courses and users. The users are all based on Simpson's characters.

  1. Build the database as a sqlite database. Again, from the webwork3 directory, perl t/db/build_db.pl. There shouldn't be an errors or output.
  2. You can run database test, but unnecessary. prove t/db/*.t and hopefully (again) no errors will pop up.

Development build/test the web UI

This section builds all of the UI code using webpack and fires up a browser window to view the webwork3 interface.

  1. Inside the webwork3 directory, execute yarn install or npm install. If you don't have yarn or npm installed, see yarn homepage or npm homepage.

    There are some warnings (mostly deprecations) that can be ignored.

  2. Start the development server with quasar dev and again hopefully there are no errors.

  3. Visit http://localhost:8080/webwork3/login (or perhaps a different port) in your web browser (the output of the the quasar dev command says where to go).

  4. You should get a "Login to WeBWorK" screen. You can use the Lisa Simpson account with the username lisa and the password lisa.

Production build and deployment (instructions for apache2 on Ubuntu)

TODO: add instructions for other servers and operating systems and add a docker deployment approach

  1. Install node version 16 with the following.
curl -fsSL https://deb.nodesource.com/setup_16.x | sudo -E bash -
sudo apt install nodejs

  1. Inside the webwork3 directory, execute yarn install or npm install.

  2. Build the client side user interface with quasar build or npm run build.

  3. Copy webwork3/dist/spa to /var/www/html/webwork3 (or create a link).

  4. Enable the necessary apache2 modules.

sudo a2enmod headers proxy proxy_http rewrite
  1. Copy conf/apache2/webwork3-apache2.dist.conf to conf/apache2/webwork3-apache2.conf, and create a link to that file in /etc/apache2/conf-enabled. This can be accomplished by executing the following commands from the webwork3 directory.
cp conf/apache2/webwork3-apache2.dist.conf conf/apache2/webwork3-apache2.conf
sudo ln -s $(pwd)/conf/apache2/webwork3-apache2.conf /etc/apache2/conf-enabled

  1. Restart apache2 with sudo systemctl restart apache2.

  2. Set up permissions for the api with the following commands executed from the webwork3 directory.

sudo chown -R youruser:www-data logs
sudo chmod g+rw logs/*
  1. Copy conf/apache2/webwork3.dist.service to conf/apache2/webwork3.service and modify WorkingDirectory with the correct path to the webwork3 location. Make sure to uncomment the hypnotoad pid_file setting in the webwork3.yml file. Then enable and start the webwork3 api service by executing the following from within the webwork3 directory.
sudo systemctl enable $(pwd)/conf/apache2/webwork3.service
sudo systemctl start webwork3
  1. Set up permissions for the renderer with the following commands executed from the renderer directory.
sudo chown -R youruser:www-data logs
sudo chmod g+rw logs/standalone_results.log
sudo chmod -R g+rw lib/WeBWorK/tmp/* lib/WeBWorK/htdocs/tmp/*
  1. Copy conf/apache2/renderer.dist.service to conf/apache2/renderer.service and modify WorkingDirectory in the copied file with the correct path to the webwork3 location. Add pid_file => '/var/run/webwork3/renderer.pid' and proxy => 1 to the hypnotoad configuration in the render_app.conf file. Then enable and start the renderer service by executing the following from within the webwork3 directory.
sudo systemctl enable $(pwd)/conf/apache2/renderer.service
sudo systemctl start renderer

Note that anytime the server is rebooted the webwork3 api and renderer services will be automatically started.

  1. Visit localhost/webwork3.