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recodex-wiki/Fileserver.md

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Fileserver

The fileserver is a simple frontend to a disk storage space that contains auxiliary files for assignments, files submitted by users and evaluation results. For a description of the communication protocol used by the frontend and workers, see the Communication chapter

Description

The storage is implemented in Python, using the Flask web framework. This particular implementation evolved from a simple mock fileserver we used in early stages of development.

Internal storage structure

Fileserver stores its data in a configurable filesystem folder. This folder has the following subfolders:

  • ./submissions/<id> - folders that contain files submitted by users (student's solutions to assignments). <id> is an identifier received from the ReCodEx API.
  • ./submission_archives/<id>.zip - ZIP archives of all submissions. These are created automatically when a submission is uploaded. <id> is an identifier of the corresponding submission.
  • ./tasks/<subkey>/<key> - supplementary task files (e.g. test inputs and outputs). <key> is a hash of the file content (sha-1 is used) and <subkey> is its first letter (this is an attempt to prevent creating a flat directory structure).

Installation

To install and use the fileserver, it's necessary to have Python and Pip installed.

  1. Clone this repository
  2. Install dependencies using pip
pip install -r requirements.txt

Configuration and usage

There are several ways of running the ReCodEx fileserver. We'll cover two typical use cases.

Running in development mode

For simple development usage, it's possible to run the fileserver in the command line:

python3 fileserver.py runserver

When run like this, the fileserver creates a temporary directory where it stores all the files and which is deleted when it exits. It's possible to configure it to use any other directory. Use the --help flag for a complete list of options (such as the port where the server listens).

Running with uWSGI and a web server

If you need features such as HTTP authentication or efficient serving of static files, it is recommended to run the app in a full-fledged web server (such as Apache or Nginx) using WSGI. Following examples are simplified, use the --help flag of the mkconfig.py script to see all available options.

Running using uWSGI

  1. (Optional) Create a user for running the fileserver
  2. Make sure that your user can access your clone of the repository
  3. Run python mkconfig/mkconfig.py uwsgi --port PORT --user YOUR_USER --working-directory DIR
  4. Save the configuration file generated by the script and run it with uWSGI, either directly or using systemd. This depends heavily on your distribution
  5. To integrate this with another web server, see the uWSGI documentation

Note that the ways distributions package uWSGI can vary wildly. In Debian 8 it's necessary to convert the configuration file to XML and make sure that the python3 plugin is loaded instead of python. This plugin also uses Python 3.4, even though the rest of the system uses Python 3.5 - make sure to install dependencies for the correct version.