recodex-wiki/Architecture.md

# Overall Architecture
![Overall Architecture](https://github.com/ReCodEx/GlobalWiki/blob/master/images/Overall_Architecture.png)

**ReCodEx** is designed to be very modular. **WebApp** + **File Server** are one instance of the application. They contain almost all logic of the app including _user management and authentication_, _storing and versioning tasks_, _counting and assigning points_ to users etc. One instance of the app can be connected to one or more **Workers** and one **Worker** can be connected to more instances of the **WebApp**. **Worker** is connected with **WebApp** through messaging queue.

## Worker
![Worker Architecture](https://github.com/ReCodEx/GlobalWiki/blob/master/images/Worker_Architecture.png)

**Worker's** main role is securely _compile_, _run_ and _evaluate_ given submit against model solutions provided by author of each task. It is logicaly divided into three objects:
- **Message Frontend** communicates with **WebApp** using messaging queue [ZeroMQ](http://zeromq.org/). It receives new submits, operates the evaluation through **Work API** and reports progress back.
- **Worker Core** can do all evaluating steps and is responsible for security of them. Sandbox [Isolate](https://github.com/ioi/isolate) is used.
- **File Server Frontend** provides access to files on **File Server** via 
  **File API**, where testing inputs and corresponding outputs for each task and 
  other required files are stored. It's possible to upload files, too.

The worker has to:

- Download the archive containing the submission and an isoeval configuration 
  file
- Download any supplementary files based on the configuration file, such as test 
  inputs or helper programs (This can be done on demand, using a `fetch` command
  in the assignment configuration)
- Download the source codes of the student's submission
- Evaluate the submission according to the assignment's configuration
- Upload the results of the evaluation to the file server
- Notify the broker that the evaluation is finished

### Internal Worker architecture
Picture below is overall internal architecture of worker, which shows its defined classes with private variables and public functions. Vector version of this picture is available [here](https://github.com/ReCodEx/GlobalWiki/raw/master/images/Worker_Internal_Architecture.pdf).
![Internal Worker architecture](https://github.com/ReCodEx/GlobalWiki/blob/master/images/Worker_Internal_Architecture.png)

## File Server
![File Server Infrastructure](https://github.com/ReCodEx/GlobalWiki/blob/master/images/File_Server.png)

**File Server** stores data, that should be kept outside of **WebApp's** 
database (both because storing files in a database is inefficient and because 
the workers need to access the files in the simplest possible way). It should 
meet following requirements:
- store files without duplicates
- keep consistent state with main database
- serve files to workers on demand
- allow versioning of tasks with revert back feature

To meet these requirements, **Storage** and **Database** must be set as bellow.

### Storage
**Storage** is meant as disc space with some commonly used filesystem. We'll use `ext4`, but the other ones should work too. **Storage** file structure is:
```
.
├── submits
│   └── user_id
│       └── advanced_dot_net_1
│           └── submit_id
│               ├── eval.yml
│               └── source.cs
├── submit_archives
│   └── submit_id.tar.gz
├── tasks
│   ├── a
│   │   ├── a014ed2abb56371bfaf2b4298a85d5dfb56509ed
│   │   └── a5edbd8b12e670ed1e3110d6c0524000cd4c3c7a
│   └── b
│       └── b1696358b8540923eb79b68f95c0f94c13a83fa7
└── temp
    └── 1795184136b8bdddabe50453cc2cc2d46f0f7c5e
```
- **submits** keep information about all files submited by users to ReCodEx. 
  There are subdirectories _user_id_ and _advanced_dot_net_1_ which groups
  submits by users and courses the submits are for. This structure is easy to 
  maintain for new and deleted users.
- **submit_archives** contains the student submissions in compressed archives so 
  that they can be easily downloaded by workers.
- **tasks** contains supplementary files (such as test inputs or helper 
  programs) for all existing task in ReCodEx. To avoid too many files in one 
  directory, files are separated to subfolders by first character of their name.
- **temp** directory is dedicated to temporary storing outputs of programs on teachers' demand. This directory will be erased by cron job on daily basis.

### Database
For user friendly access and modifying tasks following information should be stored in database:
- list of tasks with their newest version number
- for every task and version list of used files (their hashed names)
- for every hash name one human readable filename

### Conclusion
Files are internally stored by their `sha1sum` hashes, so it's easy to implement 
versioning and get rid of files with duplicate content (multiple files can have 
the same content, which is only stored once). **Worker** also uses files by 
their hashes, which is great for local caching without worries about actual 
version number of given file. On the other hand, **Database** stores information 
about human readable names, so that the files are presented in a friendly way to 
users (teachers) in **WebApp**.