Autolab: A Ruby repository from kulwadeeso

Autolab is a course management service, initially developed by a team of students at Carnegie Mellon University, that enables instructors to offer autograded programming assignments to their students over the Web. The two key ideas in Autolab are autograding, that is, programs evaluating other programs, and scoreboards.

Autolab also provides other services that instructors expect in a course management system, including gradebooks, rosters, handins/handouts, lab writeups, code annotation, manual grading, late penalties, grace days, cheat checking, meetings, partners, and bulk emails.

Since 2010, Autolab has had a transformative impact on education at CMU. Each semester, it is used by about 5,000 CMU students in courses in Pittsburgh, Silicon Valley, Qatar, and Rwanda. In Fall, 2014, we are releasing Autolab as an open-source system, where it will be available to schools all over the world, and hopefully have the same impact it's had at CMU.

Subscribe to our mailing list to receive announcements about major releases and updates to the Autolab Project.

Try It Out

We have a demo site running at https://nightly.autolabproject.com/. See the docs for more information on how to log in and suggestions on things to try.

Installation

We released new documentation! Check it out here.

Testing

Setting up Tests

Add a test database in database.yml
Create and migrate the database.
```
RAILS_ENV=test bundle exec rails db:create
RAILS_ENV=test bundle exec rails db:migrate
```
Do not forget to use RAILS_ENV=test bundle exec in front of every rake/rails command.
Create necessary directories.
```
mkdir attachments/ tmp/
```

Running Tests

After setting up the test environment, simply run spec by:

bundle exec rails spec

Rails 5 Support

Autolab is now running on Rails 6. The Rails 5 branch can be found on master-rails-5. We will not be backporting any new features from master to master-rails-5, and we have discontinued Rails 5 support.

Updating Docs

To install mkdocs, run

pip install --user mkdocs

We rely on the mkdocs-material theme, which can be installed with

pip install --user mkdocs-material

To run and preview this locally, run:

mkdocs serve

Once your updated documentation is in master, Jenkins will automatically run a job to update the docs. You can trigger a manual update with

mkdocs gh-deploy

This will build the site using the branch you are currently in (hopefully master), place the built HTML files into the gh-pages branch, and push them to GitHub. GitHub will then automatically deploy the new content in gh-pages.

Contributing

We encourage you to contribute to Autolab! Please check out the Contributing to Autolab Guide for guidelines about how to proceed. You can reach out to us on Slack as well.

License

Autolab is released under the Apache License 2.0.

Using Autolab

Please feel free to use Autolab at your school/organization. If you run into any problems, you can reach the core developers at autolab-dev@andrew.cmu.edu and we would be happy to help. On a case-by-case basis, we also provide servers for free. (Especially if you are an NGO or small high-school classroom)

Changelog

v2.9.0 (2022/08/08) Metrics Excluded Categories and New Speedgrader Interface

Instructors can now exclude selected categories of assessments from metrics watchlist calculations
Introduced new speedgrader interface which utilizes the Golden Layout library, amongst other new features
Numerous bug fixes and improvements

v2.8.0 (2021/12/20) GitHub Integration and Roster Upload Improvement

Students can now submit code via GitHub
Improved Roster Upload with better error reporting
Numerous bug fixes and improvements

(2021/10/12) Moved from Uglifier to Terser

Autolab has migrated from Uglifier to Terser for our Javascript compressor to support the latest Javascript syntax. Please change Uglifier.new(harmony: true) to :terser in your production.rb

v2.7.0 (2021/05/29) Autolab Docker Compose, Student Metrics, Redesigned Documentation

Integration with new Docker Compose installation method
Student Metrics Feature, which allows instructors to identify students who may require attention
Redesigned Autolab documentation
Numerous bug fixes and improvements

v2.6.0 (2020/10/24) Formatted Feedbacks, Course Dashboard, Accessibility

Formatted Feedback feature
Introduction of Course Dashboards
Numerous bug fixes and improvements

v2.5.0 (2020/02/22) Upgrade from Rails 4 to Rails 5

Autolab has been upgraded from Rails 4 to Rails 5 after almost a year of effort! There are still some small bugs to be fixed, but they should not affect the core functionality of Autolab. Please file an issue if you believe you have found a bug.

For older releases, please check out the releases page.

kulwadeeso/Autolab