6.3 KiB
Running the discussion service
Instruction for Mac
Installing Mongodb
If you haven't done so already:
brew install mongodb
Make sure that you have mongodb running. You can simply open a new terminal tab and type:
mongod
Installing elasticsearch
brew install elasticsearch
For debugging, it's often more convenient to have elasticsearch running in a terminal tab instead of in background. To do so, simply open a new terminal tab and then type:
elasticsearch -f
Setting up the discussion service
You can retrieve the source code from the github repository.
First go into the edx_all directory. Then type
git clone https://github.com/edx/cs_comments_service.git
cd cs_comments_service/
If you see a prompt asking "Do you wish to trust this .rvmrc file?", type "y"
Now if you see this error "Gemset 'cs_comments_service' does not exist," run the following command to create the gemset and then use the rvm environment manually:
rvm gemset create 'cs_comments_service'
rvm use 1.9.3@cs_comments_service
Now use the following command to install required packages:
bundle install
The following command creates database indexes:
bundle exec rake db:init
Now use the following command to generate seeds (basically some random comments in Latin):
bundle exec rake db:seed
It's done! Launch the app now:
ruby app.rb
Integrating with the edx platform
The API key must match on both sides. It is configured here:
- edx-platform: COMMENTS_SERVICE_KEY in your dev.py file (dev environment) or ENV_TOKENS (prod environment)
- cs_comments_service: api_key in the application.yml file (dev environment) or ENV variable (prod environment)
Running the delayed job worker
In the discussion service, notifications are handled asynchronously using a third party gem called delayed_job. If you want to test this functionality, run the following command in a separate tab:
bundle exec rake jobs:work
From the edx-platform django app, initialize roles and permissions
To fully test the discussion forum, you might want to act as a moderator or an administrator. Currently, the roles are:
- moderators can manage everything in the forum, and
- administrators can manage everything plus assigning and revoking moderator status of other users.
First make sure that the database is up-to-date:
paver update_db
If you have created users in the edx-platform django apps when the comment service was not running, you will need to one-way sync the users into the comment service back end database:
./manage.py lms sync_user_info
Now initialize roles and permissions, providing a course id. See the example below. Note that you do not need to do this for Studio-created courses, as the Studio application does this for you.
./manage.py lms seed_permissions_roles "MITx/6.002x/2012_Fall"
To assign yourself as a moderator, use the following command (assuming your username is "test", and the course id is "MITx/6.002x/2012_Fall"):
./manage.py lms assign_role test Moderator "MITx/6.002x/2012_Fall"
To assign yourself as an administrator, use the following command
./manage.py lms assign_role test Administrator "MITx/6.002x/2012_Fall"
Some other useful commands
generate seeds for a specific forum
The seed generating command above assumes that you have the following discussion tags somewhere in the course data:
<discussion for="Welcome Video" id="video_1" discussion_category="Video"/>
<discussion for="Lab 0: Using the Tools" id="lab_1" discussion_category="Lab"/>
<discussion for="Lab Circuit Sandbox" id="lab_2" discussion_category="Lab"/>
For example, you can insert them into overview section as following:
<chapter name="Overview">
<section format="Video" name="Welcome">
<vertical>
<video youtube="0.75:izygArpw-Qo,1.0:p2Q6BrNhdh8,1.25:1EeWXzPdhSA,1.50:rABDYkeK0x8"/>
<discussion for="Welcome Video" id="video_1" discussion_category="Video"/>
</vertical>
</section>
<section format="Lecture Sequence" name="System Usage Sequence">
<%include file="sections/introseq.xml"/>
</section>
<section format="Lab" name="Lab0: Using the tools">
<vertical>
<html> See the <a href="/section/labintro"> Lab Introduction </a> or <a href="/static/handouts/schematic_tutorial.pdf">Interactive Lab Usage Handout </a> for information on how to do the lab </html>
<problem name="Lab 0: Using the Tools" filename="Lab0" rerandomize="false"/>
<discussion for="Lab 0: Using the Tools" id="lab_1" discussion_category="Lab"/>
</vertical>
</section>
<section format="Lab" name="Circuit Sandbox">
<vertical>
<problem name="Circuit Sandbox" filename="Lab_sandbox" rerandomize="false"/>
<discussion for="Lab Circuit Sandbox" id="lab_2" discussion_category="Lab"/>
</vertical>
</section>
</chapter>
Currently, only the attribute "id" is actually used, which identifies discussion forum. In the code for the data generator, the corresponding lines are:
generate_comments_for("video_1")
generate_comments_for("lab_1")
generate_comments_for("lab_2")
We also have a command for generating comments within a forum with the specified id:
bundle exec rake db:generate_comments[type_the_discussion_id_here]
For instance, if you want to generate comments for a new discussion tab named "lab_3", then use the following command
bundle exec rake db:generate_comments[lab_3]
Running tests for the service
bundle exec rspec
Warning: the development and test environments share the same elasticsearch index. After running tests, search may not work in the development environment. You simply need to reindex:
bundle exec rake db:reindex_search
debugging the service
You can use the following command to launch a console within the service environment:
bundle exec rake console
show user roles and permissions
Use the following command to see the roles and permissions of a user in a given course (assuming, again, that the username is "test"):
./manage.py lms show_permissions moderator
You need to make sure that the environment variables are exported. Otherwise you would need to do
./manage.py lms show_permissions moderator