This is the source distribution of Praktomat, a programming course manager.

Resources

In case of bugs or feature requests, please use the Bug tracker. There is also a moderated mailing list for Praktomat administrators: [email protected].

General setup

You need Python 2.7 and a recent version of pip. I also highly recommend to use virtualenv so your system Python installation remains clean.

Prerequisites

We recommend to run Praktomat within Apache, using Postgresql as database.

On a Debian or Ubuntu System, install the packages

postgresql
apache2-mpm-worker

In ubuntu 16 the package apache2-mpm-worker has been merged into apache2.

Praktomat requires some 3rd-Party libraries programs to run. On a Ubuntu/Debian System, these can be installed by installing the following packages:

libpq-dev
zlib1g-dev
libmysqlclient-dev
libsasl2-dev
libssl-dev
swig
libapache2-mod-xsendfile
libapache2-mod-wsgi

sun-java6-jdk (from the "Canonical Parner" Repository)
junit
junit4
dejagnu
gcj-jdk (jcf-dump, for checking Submissions for use of javax.* etc)

git-core

If youre going to use Praktomat to check Haskell submissions, you will also require the packages:

ghc libghc-test-framework-dev libghc-test-framework-hunit-dev libghc-test-framework-quickcheck2-dev

For Checkstyle, we recommend getting checkstyle-all-4.4.jar

http://sourceforge.net/projects/checkstyle/files/checkstyle/4.4/

If you want your users to submit Isabelle theories, add the following line to /etc/mime.types:

text/x-isabelle thy

Python 2.7

The Praktomat currently requires Python 2.7

On Ubuntu 11.04, Python2.7 is installed by default, but you may need to install the packages

python2.7-dev
python-setuptools
python-psycopg2
python-m2crypto
python-virtualenv

Developer setup

Clone this repo and install the required python libs to either your system-wide Python installation or inside a designated virtualenv (recommended). The following describes a recommended setup using virtualenv.

git clone --recursive git://github.com/KITPraktomatTeam/Praktomat.git
virtualenv --system-site-packages env/
. env/bin/activate
pip install -r Praktomat/requirements.txt

The initial database setup follows.

cd Praktomat
mkdir data
./src/manage-devel.py migrate --noinput
./src/manage-devel.py createsuperuser

Start the development server.

./src/manage-devel.py runserver

Deployment installation

Like for the development version, clone the Praktomat and install its dependencies:

git clone --recursive git://github.com/KITPraktomatTeam/Praktomat.git
virtualenv --system-site-packages env/
. env/bin/activate
pip install -r Praktomat/requirements.txt

Now create a database. Using postgres on Ubuntu, this might work for creating a database "praktomat_default". Also edit pg_hba.conf to allow the access.

sudo -u postgres createuser -DRS praktomat
sudo -u postgres createdb -O praktomat praktomat_default

Configure Praktomat in Praktomat/src/settings/local.py, to set data base names and paths.

Create the upload directory, populate the database:

mkdir PraktomatSupport
./Praktomat/src/manage-local.py collectstatic --noinput --link
./Praktomat/src/manage-local.py migrate --noinput

It should now be possible to start the deployment server with:

./Praktomat/src/manage-local.py runserver

If you want to deploy the project using mod_wsgi in apache you could use documentation/apache_praktomat_wsgi.conf as a starting point. Don't forget to install mod_xsendfile to serve uploaded files.

Adding the first user

If you use django for authentification, you might want to add a first user using

./Praktomat/src/manage-local.py createsuperuser -

If you use single-sign-on via Shibboleth, you can already log in. After you have logged in, you can assign super user rights to yourself using

./Praktomat/src/manage-local.py makesuperuser --username=<the_user_name>

The username is visible under “View Account”; by default it is the e-mail address submitted by the Shibboleth server.

Update

1. update the source with git from github

2. backup your database (seriously!)

3. update the static files and the database:

./Praktomat/src/manage-local.py migrate --noinput
./Praktomat/src/manage-local.py collectstatic --noinput --link

Security

Besides the security provided by Java (via the Security Manager Profiles found in src/checker/scripts/), the praktomat supports two way to insulate student submissions from the system:

• With USEPRAKTOMATTESTER = True in the settings, external commands are prefixed with sudo -u tester --. For this to work you need to add a user tester which is also a member of the default group of the user that runs the praktomat (usually praktomat).

• With USESAFEDOCKER = True, external commands are prefixed with safe-docker, which you need to have installed. You can fetch it from http://github.com/nomeata/safe-docker

  For this to work you need to have a docker image named safe-docker installed, which needs to have all required dependencies installed. A suggested docker image is available in docker-image, so to get started simply run

   sudo docker build -t safe-docker docker-image
  

We recommend USESAFEDOCKER, as that is what we test in practice.

The Praktomat tries to limit the resources available to the student submissions:

• The runtime of the submission can be limited (setting TEST_TIMEOUT)
• The maximum amount of memory used can be limited (setting TEST_MAXMEM, only supported with USESAFEDOCKER).
• The maximum size of a file produced by a user submission (setting TEST_MAXFILESIZE, currently not supported with USESAFEDOCKER, until http://stackoverflow.com/questions/25789425 is resolved)

At the time of writing, the amount of diskspace available to the user is unlimited, which can probably be exploited easily.

jPlag integration

Praktomat provides a rudimentary, but convenient integration of the plagiarism detection program jPlag. Do enable this support, you have to do these two steps:

• Download the latest jPlag release (latest tested version: v2.11.8)
• Copy the resulting .jar file somewhere on the Praktomat server.
• In the settings, set JPLAGJAR = /full/path/to/jplag.jar

PhpBB integration

To access the praktomat usersessions from an phpBB folow the instructions in src/sessionprofile/phpbb/README.txt.