- Learn about Planet and the difference between Nations and Communities
- Use Vagrant to create a local Planet Community
- Register your Community and sync it with the Nation
The Planet is not only a library, but also an individualized learning system, where students can select their own books and courses to target their individual goals. The two kinds of Planet apps are described below.
- Communities are how the Planet functions on a local network, with users connecting to a community using either a laptop or a Raspberry Pi and a router.
- Periodically communities sync with Nations on the internet, which includes sending and receiving educational materials.
- In step 1 you created a Planet community on your computer. As you follow the steps on this page, you will access and configure your community.
- Nations are Planet apps for the Internet, allowing communities to interact with each other.
- Nations are connected to many communities and can run reports on any communities it owns.
- As you complete these instructions, an OLE administrator will complete the registration of your community with the Virtual Intern Nation.
Please go to http://localhost:3100 or run vagrant global-status in the command line to see if your community Planet is currently running. If not, please cd into planet directory in your local machine and run vagrant up prod. Make sure to have the correct port number(3100), or else it will not work.
Open browser and browse http://localhost:3100. You should see the user interface of application (see below). If you get an Unable to connect page, check out Q14 at FAQ.
CouchDB (also known as Apache CouchDB) is a database software that we use for the Planet. You can see the backend interface of our CouchDB at http://localhost:2300/_utils. In _utils, you have the opportunity to see all data of your Planet application. PouchDB is an open-source JavaScript database inspired by Apache CouchDB that is designed to run well within the browser. This allows applications to save data locally, so that users can enjoy all the features of an app even when they're offline. This database is also used in the planet.
To see the actual user interface, go to http://localhost:3100. You will be shown the page below. Make sure you remember the credentials.
WARNING: Before you finish the registration, do not close your browser. You cannot go to the above registration form again. If you are in this situation, look at the ** Second element of Troubleshooting in this page**
Next, fill out the configurations. Your name must be the same and should match your GitHub name so we can easily locate your community in Virtual Intern Nation. Pick Virtual Intern Nation (vi) for nation as in the example below. After filling out your configurations, remember to save a screenshot of the configuration page so that you can post it on the Discord server after submitting your registration request.
Note: To add images in the chat, just drag the image from your directory to the browser context and drop it in the messaging area or simply copy and paste the image.
Next, you will see a form that requires the contact details of the administrator (maintainer) of the community. Please provide your contact information.
Then, click on the "Submit" button. Your registration request for your community will be sent to the nation side for approval. You will see the following message.
Now you can login with the admin credential you created.
Then, post to the Discord server the screenshot you took earlier.
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When trying to access http://localhost:3100 you may experience an error such as the following: "no_db_found". A simple solution will be using
vagrant halt prodvagrant destroy prodto delete the current machine, then tryvagrant up prodto rebuild it. -
If you accidentally delete your Planet admin account, creating a new learner account on the login page will cause problems in later steps. The best way to solve this problem is to start over and create a new community. Run
vagrant halt prod
vagrant destroy -f prod
rm -rf .vagrant
git pull
vagrant up prod
in your planet folder. This destroys and removes your community, pulls the latest code, and starts a community from scratch.
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In the case that you use the command
vagrant destroy prod, your community Planet would be wiped together with the virtual machine, but community registration would still exist on the nation side. After rebuilding your community Planet usingvagrant up prod, fill out the configurations again with a slightly different Name (e.g. adding a number or letter to the end of your original GitHub username) so that we can still locate your community on the Nation side. Also, remember to take a screenshot of the new configuration page and post it to the Discord server. -
There is a chance upon having your account approved that the website does not recognize you as registered. You will be stuck infinitely loading and upon refresh, the page will be blank.
In order to fix this problem, simply follow the procedures stated above in step 3: use vagrant destroy prod, then vagrant up prod. Afterwards, use a slightly different name for your configuration, take a screenshot of the new configuration page, and post it to the Discord server.
- When you are trying to access http://localhost:3100 the page may not load at all, even if your account was configured correctly and fully approved. A first step would be to run
vagrant halt prod. Then, you should proceed to clear the cookies from your browser. This step will be different for each browser. Finally, you should runvagrant up prodto restart the VM before you reopen the browser to access the Planet again. If this does not work, follow the previous steps above to rebuild your planet account.
Next Section (Step 1.3) →
Now you have configured your community Planet, head over to Vagrant Tutorial to learn about how to interact with Vagrant through the command-line interface. You should be familiar with this since you will need to use it to control virtual machines during your internship.