/CodeBox-Old

A platform to host programming competition on.

Primary LanguageTypeScript

CodeBox

Codebox is a platform made for hosting programming competitions.

Prequisites

Before getting started, we must install some dependencies. Here is a list of all the dependencies CodeBox needs:

  • Running on Linux system
    • Tested on Debian and Ubuntu systems
  • NodeJS v8 or greater
  • GCC (for running C programs)
  • G++ (for running C++ programs)
  • Python 3 (etc...)
  • Go 1.10
  • Make, for running build scripts
  • Yarn, to install dependencies

Getting started

To get started, clone the repo:

	git clone https://github.com/brendanfh/CodeBox

Then, from inside the new directory, install dependencies with yarn:

	cd CodeBox && yarn

Setting up a competition

Everything about a competition is stored in a single folder, that has a structure like this:

competition/
	problems/  --Stores all the problem information
		problem_name1/
			description.md --The description of the problem, as it will be displayed to competitors
			problem.json --Problem configuration
			test-1.in  --Input for test 1
			test-1.out --Output for test 1
			...
			test-n.in  --Input for test n
			test-n.out --Output for test n
		problem_name2/
		problem_name3/
		...

	temp/ --Empty folder that temporary files will be stored

	cbdb.sqlite --Sqlite3 database

	config.json --Configuration for the competition (see below)

Most of the magic happens in the config.json. An exmaple config.json is something like this:

{
	"hosting_name": "NAME OF HOSTING LOCATION",

	"email_verify_regex": ".+@example\\.com$",

	"forgot_password_email": "someone@something.com",
	"forgot_password_email_password": "Password1!",

	"port": 80,
	"ssl_port": 443,

	"ssl_cert": "/path/to/ssl.crt",
	"ssl_key": "/path/to/ssl.key",

	"start_time": "2018-09-22T10:00:00-05:00", //UTC timestamp for start and end
	"end_time": "2018-09-22T15:00:00-05:00",
	"problems": {
		"A": "folder_name1", // Maps problem letters to folder names in competition folder
		"B": "folder_name2",
		...
	}
}

Starting the competition

We can start the competition by doing the following.

  1. We open a terminal and set the ROOT_DIR environment variable to our competition folder.

     export ROOT_DIR=/path/to/competition/folder

  2. We then run the webserver using make.

     make server

  3. This starts our web server, but at the moment, any submissions will not be run. To fix that, we open another terminal and set the ROOT_DIR to the same as we did before. Then we run the executer with the following make command.

     make executer

  4. The server and executer will automatically link together. You have started your own competition!