The Odin Project

http://theodinproject.com/ [version 0.1.0]

The Open Curriculum for Learning Web Development

This site provides the main user experience for The Odin Project, including the home page and all user functions. It is meant to be a shell around The Odin Project Curriculum and to include the tools that help students to pair together and get to know others who are working on the curriculum.

It has been open-sourced to provide both a learning resource for students who want to see how the tools they're using are built and to give students the opportunity to stretch their wings and contribute to a real open-sourced project... while building the tools they themselves will be using.

Thus far, the code has been more or less hacked together so don't use it as a star example of how things should be done! We'll be rolling out some better documentation and contribution instructions as this develops a little further.

For minor fixes, either submit a github issue or a pull request. Please coordinate with the project maintainers if you're interested in working on some of the larger features in order to avoid traffic jams.

Contact us directly at [email protected]

Future Development

The file dev_roadmap.md will be more specific (it's the working document) but there are some overall goals for the short term development of this project:

• Improve the overall user experience while using the curriculum
• Start rolling out realtime collaboration features and progress tracking for students who are using the curriculum.
• Improve test coverage, particularly for the curriculum and the scheduling tool (which is all javascript).
• Improve the documentation of the existing code base so people can more easily navigate through it. This means in-line commenting and also creating a higher level github wiki page that explains how the project works and the best ways to navigate it.

If you'd like to help out (even as a relative newbie), please get in touch and we'd be happy to point you in the right direction.

Hacking on the Site Yourself

1. This site runs on Ruby 1.9.3 and Rails 3.2.12.

2. Fork the repo by clicking the Fork button at the top right and then download your copy of the repo to your local machine by doing a git clone [email protected]:YOUR_USERNAME/theodinproject.git

3. Run a $ bundle install of all the gems

4. Note: Both local and production databases are Postgres, so if you're used to just using Rails' default SQLite database you'll need to get Postgres fired up on your local machine. You can probably get away with just typing $ rake db:create but may need to download a client for it and create a theodinproject database that the application can connect to. The major difference is that Postgres operates almost like a server. Ryan Bates has a RailsCast episode about migrating to Postgres that may be helpful if you're a newbie. If you're deployed on Heroku (which we are), you need to use PG anyway.

5. Once you've got postgres installed and have created the empty database, run a $ rake db:migrate to run all the migrations that will set up the schema properly. The db/seeds.rb file is used to populate all the course and lesson meta-data. It is identical to the data you'll see presented on the production site (this is used to populate it). You can run it as many times as you'd like... it basically deletes all metadata and repopulates it with each run. The seeds file only creates curriculum data, it doesn't create any users.

6. One thing the seeds file will not populate is the content for each lesson. This needs to be retrieved from the curriculum repository on github by running the rake task ($ rake curriculum:update_content). But there's a catch... it uses my Github Api key from the below-mentioned Figaro gem in order to avoid rate limits (Github only allows you something like 50 API calls per hour if you haven't registered for an API key with them and used it to authenticate your requests). As of this writing, there are 56 lessons so you would be rate limited before even finishing populating them with the rake task if you don't get an API key yourself.

7. The Moot forums and Github API calls rely on private environment variables (to store their API secret keys) that you won't find in the repo. I upload them directly to the server myself using the figaro gem and a corresponding file called application.yml that's located in my config/ directory but not checked into git (no, you can't have my passwords). Check out the Figaro Documentation for a very easy-to-understand explanation of how the gem works. You basically just need to run $ rails generate figaro:install and populate the missing variables to application.yml. An example, as of this writing:

    # config/application.yml
    moot_api_key: UjI8SKQv6J
    moot_secret_key: no_you_cant_have_my_secret_key
    GITHUB_API_TOKEN: your_token_would_go_here
   

You can create your own "personal access token" HERE. It's being used here to increase the number of calls we can make to the Github API to access the curriculum each hour. As for the moot key... you may not be able to use the forums feature without one. Anyone have ideas how to get around that?

1. Run a $ rails server and see if that lets you check out the app at http://localhost:3000.
2. That... should... be... it...?

I haven't had to clone and start from scratch yet so please let me know what I've missed here!

Nifty Features

The scheduling tool allows users to sign up and show when they're available to pair up on projects.

Referral Link

You can set up a referral link so that someone can click on it and get taken directly to the scheduler with that project already added to their list. To do so, just use the format:

http://www.theodinproject.com/?cb=[id of project]

...where [id of project] should be the ID of the project (called a "content_bucket" in the schema) you'd like them to work on directly. If I wanted to have someone work with me on the edX SAAS homework assignment #4, I would use the link:

http://www.theodinproject.com/?cb=6

Using IDs is obviously not ideal but it's the best we've got right now. If you're wondering which project goes with which ID, your best bet right now is to guess-and-check by following those links... there aren't too many projects so it shouldn't be too tough.

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Created by [Erik Trautman](http://www.github.com/eriktrautman)