FireRoad is an iOS/Android application that allows MIT students to plan their course selections, view up-to-date major/minor requirements, and discover new courses. The FireRoad Server is a Django server that provides a data backend and document "cloud" for the native apps as well as the web-based CourseRoad application.
Follow these instructions to set up and run your own instance of the FireRoad server. You may want to create a new virtual environment using conda, for example:
conda create -n fireroad python=2.7
conda activate fireroad
Then, enter the repo directory and run the setup script, which will install any necessary packages and set up the database.
cd fireroad-server
./setup.sh
To set up a catalog (including courses and requirements lists):
./setup_catalog.sh
This script will prompt you to download a copy of the course catalog from the prod site if you have not already. Otherwise, you can run the catalog setup script without pre-initialized catalogs, then run the scraper yourself following the instructions in data/readme.md.
To run the server (with the conda environment activated), use
python manage.py runserver
By default, the server runs on port 8000. You can specify a different port by simply adding the port number after the runserver command. (The manage.py script is provided by Django and provides other useful commands such as migrating the database, collecting static files, and opening an interactive shell.)
Note that the project contains three Django settings modules: fireroad/settings.py (local development), fireroad/settings_dev.py (dev server), and fireroad_settings_prod.py (prod server). When making changes to the settings, please make sure to change the file appropriate to the environment on which you want the changes to take effect (and note that the latter two import the base settings.py file). In order to specify which settings module should be used, you will need to set the DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE environment variable to fireroad.settings{VARIANT}, and change the default value specified in fireroad/wsgi.py if deploying with WSGI.
Depending on your settings, there may be additional files that you can add to enable certain capabilities:
- To use a MySQL database, add a
fireroad/dbcreds.pyfile that specifies the necessary authentication info as Python variablesdbname,username,password, andhost. - To enable sending emails to admins for unresolved edit requests, etc., create an email address with two-factor authentication disabled (gmail works well). Then add a
fireroad/email_creds.pyfile that specifies authentication info as a comma-delimited string with three components: the email server (e.g.smtp.gmail.com), the email address, and the password for the email account.
The FireRoad API is fully documented at fireroad.mit.edu/reference (dev version at fireroad-dev.mit.edu/reference). When submitting PRs that modify the behavior of these endpoints or add new ones, please update the docs in common/templates/docs accordingly.