TAMatch

TA Application and Assignment System as a CSCE 431-Singapore 2019 Project

What is TAMatch?

Purpose

This project aims to serve as a platform for Texas A&M Graduate Students and faculty to minimize human intervention in the application process for TA's.

Functionalities

• Allow professors to preference TA’s
• Allow TA’s to specify which kinds of classes they want / don’t want to teach
• Maximize amount of successful matches between preferred professors/TA’s/classes and quantify it with a score
• Allow admin to manage instructors, matches, and applications

Proposed Functionalities

• Notification system (maybe even via email?)
• Overhaul of matchmaker (to allow for multiple sections of a course for example)
• Allow for course/section creation
• Allow TA’s to preference professors

Check it out!

• Demo - Heroku
• Our Progress :D - Pivotal Tracker

Testing

Some setup must be done in order to get testing functionality up and running.

• Clone the repository into an aws instance w/ ruby and rails all set.
• Make sure that Postgresql is primed.

    sudo yum install postgresql postgresql-server postgresql-devel postgresql-contrib postgresql-docs
  

    sudo service postgresql initdb
  

    sudo service postgresql start
  

• cd into the project directory and do the usual ruby setup.

    bundle install
  

• Create a super user account for ec2-user (ignore the directory errors)

    sudo -u postgres createuser -s ec2-user
  

    sudo -u postgres createdb ec2-user
  

    sudo su postgres
    psql
    ALTER USER "ec2-user" WITH SUPERUSER;
    \q
    exit
  

• Set up the test database (cd into the project directory)

    rails db:reset RAILS_ENV=test
  

• You're good to go!

Deploying

This section assumes you have went through the previous section.

• In order to run on the AWS instance, run:

  rails server
  

  You should be able to use the preview feature of the Cloud9 environment to see the application's log in view.

• In order to run on the Heroku:

  • Make sure you have the postgres add-on on your application in the Heroku Dashboard.
  • Set up Google OAuth:

    • Create an application using Google's developer console. Here's a tutorial.

      • Grab the Client ID and secret
      • Set your heroku app as an authorized javascript origin (https://YOUR_APP.herokuapp.com)
      • Set your OAuth callback as an authorized redirect URI (https://YOUR_APP.herokuapp.com/auth/google/callback)

    • With your Client ID and secret, create a source file, but MAKE SURE this is not passed around willy-nilly. (Example)

    • For example:

      creds.txt

        export OAUTH_ID="YOUR_CLIENT_ID"
        export OAUTH_KEY="YOUR_CLIENT_SECRET"
      

      > source creds.txt
      

  • Assuming you've linked your local repo to your heroku app, git push heroku master should bring your app to Heroku.
  • In order to manage your database, make a note of these commands:
    • heroku restart
    • heroku pg:reset DATABASE
    • heroku run rails db:migrate
    • heroku run rails db:seed

Data

This section covers how you work with the different kinds of data (Courses, Users, Applications)

• The seed data for courses and applicants are located in TAMatch/app/assets/ with their format being specified by the header in each file.
• The actual seed file is located in TAMatch/db/seeds.rb
• In case you want to change something on the fly on heroku, run heroku run rails console. Here, you are able to run commands such as u = User.find_by(email: "[email protected]") and modify them as you see fit before running u.save.
• In order to test the different views (Admin, Instructor, Student), there are prepared test accounts to be used. Just navigate to WEBAPPURL/auth?test_*, where "*" is 'a', 'i', or 's', corresponding to the aforementioned roles. These can only be used once, since it resets the authentication token, but rails db:reset can be ran to reset them. If you want to prepare your own test accounts or seed an account with your email, seeds.rb should have an ample amount of examples to look at.

Brought to you by Team Winter is Missing (Ivan Delgado, Ryan Garmeson, Mackenzie Ford, Big-E Kee, and Benjamin Wong)