CodecastTaskBackend

Purpose

This project aims at providing a back-end server that will serve as a companion to the Codecast front-end. The main functionalities provided by this back-end are:

• fetch information about a specific task
• grade a user submission on a task
• save user source code and avancement on a task

It is a complete rewriting in NodeJS/TypeScript of TaskPlatform which has been written in PHP in 2015.

Interactions

The Codecast front-end can interact with this backend through a JSON API with GET or POST methods (see the available routes in src/server.ts).

This back-end can then interact with other back-end servers. In particular, to grade a user submission, this back-end calls the API of the grader queue to run tests on the user submission.

This back-end also interacts with a MySQL database that will store:

• the available tasks that can be solved with Codecast
• the user submissions and the grading of each of the submissions
• the user source codes

The goal is for this database to keep the same structure as the one used by TaskPlatform so that the migration from TaskPlatform to CodecastTaskBackend can be done smoothly.

Project status

This project is currently in development and not used in production yet.

Development

You need to have NodeJS and Yarn installed on your computer. Then, clone this project and use:

yarn
yarn dev

Testing

To run the Cucumber tests, prepare the testing environment:

1. Create a database task_platform_test
2. Import schema.sql into this database
3. Copy .env to a .env.test file and fill in your database credentials

Then, run:

yarn test

Building

To build a new version of the back-end, use:

yarn build

Generate a pair of public/private keys

openssl genrsa -out key.pem 2048
openssl rsa -in key.pem -outform PEM -pubout -out public.pem