Canvas 2.0

Project Description

Hey all! This repository is an archive of a project that I worked on for my Secure, Parallel and Distributed Programming in Python class in my Spring 2022 semester of college. The semester project team up and "design and implement an application that solves a real-world problem in Python." According to the prompt: "the project should prominently feature aspects of Information Management, Secure Computing, Parallel Computing, and Distributed Computing"

So, for this class I decided up to group up with my old friend Peter Vasiljev (@pv-230) and my new friend Shreay Patel (@shreayp) to reimplement the popular learning management service, Canvas. Canvas 2 seeks to combine Canvas and Turnitin into one sleek web app that professors can use to manage assignments for their classes with plagiarism detection built-in. Working with Peter and Shreay was a blast; I think we all learned a lot from this project, and it's one of the best flask projects I've made in a while. It's most certainly the one I'm the most proud of.

I hope you all enjoy our work! :)

Distribution of Work

• Andrew Augustine (azure_agst): Initial project structure, database design, testing, containerization, server configuration
• Peter Vasiljev (pv-230): All frontend design (Flask, Jinja2 templates, CSS/JS), testing, contributions to backend development
• Shreay Patel (shreayp): Integration of plagiarism detection via Jaccard/Simhash algos, testing, contributions to backend development

List of Libraries

See requirements.txt.

Setup

• Clone the repo to your location of choice.
• Create a venv using python3 -m venv .venv
• Activate the venv using source .venv/bin/activate
  • Pro Tip: you can use the . shorthand for source in some shells
• Install requirements using pip3 install -r requirements.txt
• Make sure .flaskenv is up to date :)
• Run using flask run

Running

New! Docker

Users authenticated with the GitHub Container Registry can use our Docker image to get things up and running! Just put all required env vars in .flaskenv and run the following command:

docker run -d --env-file=".flaskenv" -p 5000:5000 ghcr.io/azure-agst/canvas2

Development

• Put all env vars in .flaskenv then use flask run.
  • Flask will load the variables in .flaskenv into the session, then launch the generator function in our package's __init__.py file

Production

• waitress-serve --call 'canvas2:create_app'
  • Waitress does NOT use .flaskenv, but then again all variables that would have been specified in that file should be configured server-side anyway.

Testing

• Install the canvas2 package in development mode using pip3 install -e .
  • This is the purpose of the setup.py file
  • setup.cfg is used later in our testing suite to specify vars for pytest and coverage.
• You are now ready to test!
• Then use pytest to test the code
  • Pytest will look for any files in tests/ that begin with test_, and then run functions in those files that also begin with that same prefix.
• You can also run coverage tests with coverage run -m pytest
  • After running, generate a report using coverage report

References

Icons Used: https://materialdesignicons.com/