YACS

Simple, Sane Course Scheduling.

YACS is a web-based course schedule with an emphasis on usability. It is also flexible enough to work with other school course data.

Send questions and comments to @jeffhui or jeff@jeffhui.net

If you're an RPI student and looking to use it, go to yacs.me

Setup

YACS is actively developed on Python 2.7. So go get that installed first. It's good python practice to put this project inside a virtualenv, but that's beyond the scope of this README.

You can download an archive from the top-right of the github page or clone the repo:

git clone https://github.com/jeffh/YACS

Which will download code into a YACS folder where you run this command.

Dependencies

YACS is built on top of Django 1.8. Thus, it requires a database driver to run. Install the appropriate driver and its database, or just use the bundled SQLite.

Setup (Development)

1. YACS uses a lot of dependencies. It relies on pip to install most of them. Simply do: pip install -r requirements.txt Which will install most of dependencies YACS needs for postgres. Depending on your operating system, you'll probably need to install some system libraries for libmemcached, zlib, libsasl, psyocopg2.

2. Edit DATABASES variable in the yacs/settings/development.py file to your appropriate database settings.

3. Run the following commands. When calling syncdb, you'll be ask to create a superuser, it is purely optional, only the debug-toolbar is visible for logged in super-users.

   python manage.py syncdb
   python manage.py migrate
   

4. Next we need to get some data. Run these commands to import and setup the data for use. (These will take awhile).

   python manage.py import_course_data   # imports from RPI SIS + PDFs
   python manage.py import_catalog_data  # imports from RPI course catalog
   python manage.py create_section_cache # creates cache for generating schedules
   

   It is ok for these commands to emit parse errors.

5. Check it out by running the dev server python manage.py runserver and pointing your browser to http://localhost:8000/ and viola!

6. By default, YACS will hide the course data for manual review. Go to the django admin and make the semesters visible to see them in your user interface.

Vagrant

Vagrant is a tool which builds a development VM. The VM for YACS is based on terrywant/archlinux and is provisioned by vagrant.sh. The development environment is contained in a python virtualenv by berdario/pew. The development instance is configured to use PostgreSQL.

After you have vagrant installed, to start developing, just:

1. vagrant up to boot and provision the VM.
2. cd /vagrant && pew workon yacs to get in the working environment.
3. Do as step 3-6 above.

Notes:

• /vagrant is shared between the host and the VM, so you can use whatever you like in the host to develop.
• Port 8000 is forwarded so the default preview works the same, but if you want to change the port number you have to forward that in the Vagrantfile as well.

Setup (Production)

It's probably best to use the associated project: seafood. Which is a salt configuration project that can be used to set up a server for YACS.

The following environmental variables are used in production:

• YACS_ENV: The environment to use. The default is development, but this should be set to production for production settings to take effect.
• YACS_DATABASE_URL: The database url to connect. Parsed using dj_database_url. In the form of dbengine://user:pass@host/dbname
• YACS_SECRET_KEY: The internal django secret key to use. Be unique!

When using seafood, you'll need to modify the salt configuration files to be unique for your installation. YACS uses email for notifying ADMINS in project settings.

After using seafood to set up the environment, use:

```
fab -H root@my-server deploy
```

To deploy YACS to the server. Updates can be deployed to the server in the same fashion.

Project layout

Currently the project is laid out as follows:

• api: API application. Where all API related code is. Relies on courses and scheduler app.
• courses: The courses application. Contains the schema and manages the storage of course data. Also contains course-data-displaying views.
• courses_viz: An application that stores visualization of course data. (Part of Introduction to Visualization class)
• jslog: An application that can record basic JS data for debugging.
• lib: Contains library code that can, be potentially, separated into an independent project. To enforce this separability, this folder is added to the sys.path for absolute imports
• scheduler: This app handles course scheduling. Relies on the courses app for all the course data.
• yacs: Project files. Contains settings, root urls, templates, static files, etc.
• test_reports: Only appears when tests are executed. Used to see the test coverage.
• requirements: Contains various requirement files for PIP.
• Makefile: Used for running tests, cleaning python caches and deployment.
• manage.py: Django's CLI.

Help

There are still issues to tackle. Go to the GitHub issues page to see them all.