ACES is a containerized web application designed to manage software-based assignments for instructors while providing guards against various forms of cheating. The application runs through Docker and utilizes Docker-Compose to build and manage different microservices, consisting of four main pieces:

1. A web frontend (.NET Core MVC) for uploading assignments and managing students (for instructors), and a centralized location for downloading prepared assignments (for students).

2. A database (Microsoft SQL Server) for tracking instructors, students, assignments, submissions, and student assignment commits.

3. An HTTP API (Python) for uploading assignments and preparing assignments for individual student usage.

4. A Git management web frontend (Gitea) for holding remote repositories generated by students.

These instructions will get you a copy of the project up and running on your local machine for development and testing purposes. See deployment for notes on how to deploy the project on a live system.

At minimum, running ACES requires an installation of Git and Docker (and, by extension, Docker-Compose). While Docker-Compose should come with most default installations of Docker (especially on macOS or Windows), separately installing Docker-Compose on Linux may be required, and it is suggested that you follow a guide based on your distribution.

Windows 10: Follow the instructions for setup on Docker's documentation. Make sure you have Windows 10 Professional or Enterprise, and that you are configured to run Linux containers, not Windows containers.

macOS: Follow the instructions for setup on Docker's documentation. A Homebrew installation should also be relatively painless, if you prefer. Since ACES-Factory will be manipulating folders on-disk (local to the repository), Docker should have access to macOS's filesystem (which is off by default). The easiest way to fix this is to go to System Preferences > Security & Privacy > Privacy tab > Full Disk Access and check the box next to Docker.

VirtualBox and/or Linux: Development environments for all of ACES have been successfully configured on Manjaro Linux (which has a Desktop environment) and Arch Linux (which is just a terminal). If you have the space, a Manjaro Linux virtual machine is an easy way to keep dependencies isolated from your hardware.

Once Manjaro is installed, the following commands should be enough to get you running:

sudo pacman -Syu docker docker-compose
sudo systemctl start docker.service
sudo systemctl enable docker.service
sudo usermod -aG docker $USER
reboot

Make sure Docker is started and verify your installation by running the following in the terminal and receiving roughly the following output (note that version numbers may differ):

$ docker version
Client: Docker Engine - Community
 Version:           19.03.12
 [...]

Server: Docker Engine - Community
 Engine:
  Version:          19.03.12
 [...]

Then, clone the repository and cd into the appropriate folder.

git clone https://github.com/bradleypeterson/ACES.git aces && cd aces/aces

To run all the components of ACES, run this command within the same folder:

docker-compose up -d

This will boot all the services required to run ACES and will pull, build, and attach networks to containers as necessary.

From here, navigate to http://localhost:8080 to verify that the web frontend and database are working.

To develop on a specific container, follow the instructions in the given container's README.md.

Dashboard

Database

Factory

Git Hooks

Coming soon!

The true beauty of containerized applications is that running in development and running in production is virtually the same! Eventually a true CI/CD pipeline can replace this process, but for now, deployment is pretty trivial. Make sure you have SSH access to a server that has Docker, Docker-Compose, and Git.

Clone the repository onto the server, cd into the correct folder, and run docker-compose up -d.

git clone https://github.com/bradleypeterson/ACES.git aces
cd aces/aces
docker-compose up -d

Once everything is built, use docker-compose ps to observe all the running pieces of the application.

$ docker-compose ps
      Name                   Command              State              Ports
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
aces_dashboard_1   dotnet A.C.E.S.dll             Up      0.0.0.0:8080->80/tcp
aces_db_1          /opt/mssql/bin/sqlservr        Up      0.0.0.0:1433->1433/tcp
aces_factory_1     ash /app/entrypoint.sh         Up      0.0.0.0:8081->8080/tcp
aces_gitea_1       /usr/bin/entrypoint /bin/s     Up      0.0.0.0:222->22/tcp,
                   ...                                    0.0.0.0:3000->3000/tcp

Capstone Project Summer 2020:

• @Aoshua
• @TannerL
• @Morgan-Jensen
• @loganrios