inloop: A Python repository from Software Technology Group @ TU Dresden

⚠️ Deprecation Notice ⚠️

INLOOP has reached its end of life, development has stopped and this repository has been archived.

This project is no longer supported and maintained by the Software Technology Group at TU Dresden.

The original README has been preserved below.

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INLOOP, the INteractive Learning center for Object-Oriented Programming, is a Python web application to manage online programming courses, powered by Git, Django and Docker:

Flexible: you can write tasks for arbitrary programming languages, as long as they can be packaged into a Docker image.
Secure: solutions are checked inside a minimal and strictly isolated Docker container, which is discarded after execution.
Modern: push-based (or periodic pull-based) import of tasks, Markdown task descriptions and accompanying material from a Git repository.
Fast & scalable: solutions are processed asynchronously by a configurable number of background workers.
Easy to extend: modern, modular and PEP-8 compliant Python 3 code base with less than 3000 lines of code, good test coverage and continuous integration tests.

Quick start

INLOOP requires the following software:

Debian 11+ or Ubuntu 22.04+, macOS 12+ (for development only)
Python 3.9 or 3.10
Docker 20.10+ (Docker setup !!!)
Redis 5.0+
Git 2.25+ (workarounds for older Git versions)
PostgreSQL 12+

Using the command line, a development instance can be set up as follows:

If you don't have it already, install poetry and nox. If you run into trouble, the known "good" versions of the build tools are listed in tools/ci-requirements.txt.
Install and check the setup of required software with ./support/scripts/debian_setup.sh (Debian/Ubuntu) or ./support/scripts/macos_setup.sh (macOS). The script complains if it finds things that are not configured correctly and displays hints how to fix it.

On macOS, please run:

    export CFLAGS="-I$(brew --prefix openssl@1.1)/include $CFLAGS"
    export LDFLAGS="-L$(brew --prefix openssl@1.1)/lib $LDFLAGS"

(This is necessary on Python 3.7 or newer to build the psycopg2 library.)

Run make init and make loaddb to bootstrap your local development environment.
Start and monitor the development web server and huey workers with make run.
The previous step prints the address and port number of the local webserver that was started. You can immediately log in using the demo user accounts admin, staff, and student with the password secret.

You can use our Java example task repository as a starting point to explore INLOOP.

Demo

Documentation

Publications

M. Morgenstern and B. Demuth: Continuous Publishing of Online Programming Assignments with INLOOP (ISEE 2018: 1st Workshop on Innovative Software Engineering Education).

Authors and credits

Project lead: Martin Morgenstern
Contributors: Dominik Muhs, Philipp Matthes, Julian Catoni

INLOOP borrows its concept from the Praktomat, developed originally at the University of Passau and later at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology:

License

INLOOP is released under GPL version 3 (see LICENSE.txt).

Copyright (C) 2015-2022 The INLOOP authors.

INLOOP is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify
it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or
(at your option) any later version.

INLOOP is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the
GNU General Public License for more details.