Learning circles

Learning circles are study groups that meet weekly at a physical location to work together through an online course.

This is the source code for the online dashboard that helps facilitators organize and run their learning circles. You can find the dashboard at learningcircles.p2pu.org or see the online user documentation for a guide on how to use the dashboard and a description on the functionality provided.

Development

Run it locally

Install docker and docker-compose.

Run the following commands in the project directory:

docker-compose up

In a new shell:

docker-compose exec postgres psql -U postgres -c "create user lc WITH PASSWORD 'password';"
docker-compose exec postgres psql -U postgres -c "create database lc with owner lc;"
docker-compose exec postgres psql -U postgres -c "ALTER USER lc CREATEDB;"
docker-compose restart learning-circles
docker-compose exec learning-circles /opt/django-venv/bin/python manage.py migrate

You should now be able to open the dashboard on http://localhost:8000/. Any changes you make to local Python files will be reflected

To run the tests:

docker-compose -f docker-compose.test.yml run --rm learning-circles /opt/django-venv/bin/python manage.py test

To restore a database dump you need to use pg_restore installed in the learning-circles image, since that is the version used to create backups. Eg.

docker-compose exec -T learning-circles pg_restore -c -f - < db.dump | docker-compose exec -T postgres psql -U postgres -d lc

Deploying the code

We maintain a set of ansible roles to deploy learning circles in a repo called marvin. If you wish to deploy your own version, that will serve as a good guide to set up your own deployment.

You will need some 3rd party accounts for services like messaging, recapcha, etc to work:

• Mailgun - currently we're integrating using SMTP, so it should be easy to use another service
• Mailchip - when users sign up, they can join a mailing list
• Twilio - for text notifications
• Typeform - for surveying users
• AWS
  • S3 access to store backups
  • S3 access to temporarily store data exports

To setup S3 access for temporary export:

• create a S3 bucket and make sure to disable any public access
• add a lifecycle policy to the bucket to ensure that exports are deleted
• create a IAM user with access scoped to a single bucket

To do a release:

• Create a PR from master into release
• Call the PR Release YYYY-MM-DD
• Put the list of changes in the PR description
• Wait for tests to pass (docker image won't be uploaded for PR)
• Merge the PR
• Wait for the GitHub action to finish building the docker image
• Follow steps described here to deploy latest release docker image

To deploy the latest code to staging:

• Wait for the TravisCI build to finish on the master branch.
• Follow the steps described here to deploy latest staging docker image

Quick guide to the code

• Django, Postgres, Celery+RabbitMQ for async tasks.
• Front-end functionality is a mix of Django template views and React + API backend.
• An API is provided for use by https://www.p2pu.org, team sites and other rich interaction in the UI.
• Site provides identity for Discourse SSO hosted at https://community.p2pu.org
• Most code resides in the studygroups app.
• Translation is done using Transifex. Updated translation files are manually pulled from transifex.
• Database and uploaded files are backed up and uploaded to AWS S3
• Messaging is handled by mailgun, although we use SMTP for sending, so any service can be used for that. The announce list uses mailgun webhook functionality.
• We use Typeform surveys, the surveys are embedded on the site and periodically synced to the db.