Finals Club Tools & Script repo

I. Introduction

The Finals Club Foundation has been providing free and open education resources to students since 2008. As of 2011, FCF has made all services and tools free and open to those who would like to re-deploy services offered by FCF. This document shows how all services are deployed in production and what is used for best practice in a real world environment.

Current Structure

/scripts is where all scripts and utilities are kept. All scripts will be re-written in ruby for more abstractness.
/node-proxy is the old implementation of node-http-proxy that was used for routing traffic around the server.
/nginx_conf contains our nginx configuration files.

II. Basic Model

All services deployed by the Finals Club Foundation are based upon the following stack: ________________________________________________ | | | | | App.(n) | App.(n) | etc.. | | | | | ------------------------------------------------ | | | | Node.Js | django / python | | | | ------------------------------------------------ | | | GNU/Linux (ubuntu / Debian ) | | | |________________________________________________|

Base: GNU/Linux:

All servers that run services for the Finals Club Foundation start off with a generic GNU/Linux stack with:

Ubuntu-Server 11.10+
Mongodb-server
Node.Js V.0.6.13+
npm current
Monit (optional, but recommended for basic monitoring).
Dev. Tools: gcc, git, curl, make
Node Modules for each app. / service
Nginx 1.18 Web Server
Django-1.4
PostgreSQL-1.9+

While the previous is an extensive list, it is not everything. See what is included with ubuntu-server 11.10+ for other tools are on our servers.

Middle Node.js:

Node.js is a new system for writing and deploying web applications that are able to scale and update user information in real time. We used Node.js because it is a new technology that is in its infancy, but is becoming commonly used in the development of new web applications and tools. Etherpad-lite (Collaborative editor used in Finalsclub.org) is one of the many components in our many services that are written in Node.Js.

Middle Django / Python:

Karma Notes http://karmanotes.org is written using the django web framework and uses uWSGI + Nginx to provide resources. Nginx was used instead of Apache because of Apache's age and security shortcomings.

Top: App.(n)...

Some of our apps / services are written for node.js

* Finals Club.org
* Node HTTP proxy (for routing traffic around the server).

III. Deployment:

a. Finals Club

Deployment is fairly straight forward.

install git, curl, npm, node.js, mongodb-server, gcc, g++
git clone https://github.com/FinalsClub/FinalsClub.git Please put this in a common Dir. In production we use:

/var/www/$(Service)

If the server is shared with users you do not directly know, then you should create a "system user" and home for your web services. Creating a special user and home for services allows server admins. to track the activity of services and can prevent damage to the system if the App. / service is compromised.

git checkout devel # In FinalsClub src. Root.
git submodule init && git submodule update
Move "setup.sh" to another location and update to reflect the configuration of your environment.
if everything is deployed and setup properly (including sys. user account), you should be able to run "sudo start&" as the user that was created.

b. Karma Notes

This part is still in the air! Check back in a day or so :)

If the previous documentation seems off or out of date, please email:

IV. Backup / Management

To backup our static files and DB(s), we use fairly generic scripts. In the future we are looking to bup for clean incremental backups that will not take up so much space.

To use our backup.sh script, you need to define all missing env. vars and use the following structure:

Mongodb: backup.sh -m

Postgres: backup.sh -p

FinalsClub/fc_tools