Illinois Open Source Queue
A micro-service queue for holding office hours.
Join the #queue-dev channel on the UIUC OSS Slack team to keep up with development!
Using the Queue at Illinois
At UIUC, this queue is hosted as a free service by Computer Science and EngrIT.
- View the queue at https://edu.cs.illinois.edu/queue/
- Request to have a queue created for your course by filling out this short form
Running the Queue from Source
dev
mode:
Running locally in - Clone the repository
- Install
node
andnpm
- Install dependencies:
npm install
in the cloned directory - Start the server:
npm run dev
- Access the queue from a browser at
localhost:3000
- You can run it on a different port by setting the
PORT
environment variable
- Access the queue from a browser at
Multiple users in dev mode
In production, all auth is done my Shibboleth, and we just read out of the eppn
header
to get a student's identity. In dev mode, we still want to be able to test with multiple
users (for instance, to assert that user roles work correctly, or to ensue that syncing
between multiple clients works correctly). To achieve that, we use express-session
to
track users across page reloads. By default, you will assume the role of dev
, an admin
user. To force a different user, you can append ?forceuser=NETID
to any URL (this creates
a user NETID if needed). All future requests from that browser will be associated with that
user, and you can add it to course staff, etc. like a normal user.
To test with multiple users at the same time, you can open up multiple browsers, or use multiple incognito windows.
Production config
Several configuration options are exposed via environment variables:
PORT
: controls which port the app will be served from.BASE_URL
: allows the app to be served from somewhere other than the server root. This affects asset and API routes, websocket endpoints, generated links, and more. Note that for this to work effectively, the app must still receive the base URL as part of the request; this is important if the app is reverse-proxied behind Apache. For instance, if the queue is served from/my/path/
, then you should run withBASE_URL=/my/path
(note the lack of trailing slash), and a request for queue 1 should be received as/my/path/queue/1
.