CodeGradXvmauthor

CodeGradX is a grading infrastructure

• where students submit programs to solve exercises and these programs are mechanically graded,
• where authors deploy exercises and propose them to students,
• where teachers may follow the progress of a cohort of students.

The CodeGradX infrastructure is operated via REST protocols. To ease its use, CodeGradXlib is a Javascript Library that provides a programmatic API to operate the CodeGradX infrastructure. This library is contained in the codegradxlib Node module and can be operated from a browser.

CodeGradX may also be operated from command line using the codegradxagent Node module. By default, codegradxlib is configured to use the real constellation of CodeGradX servers howwver authors may use a virtual machine, named VMauthor , to write and check their exercises with their own computing resources. The new codegradxvmauthor Node module reconfigures codegradxlib to use this virtual machine.

To sum up: this module is the configuration of CodeGradXagent for VMauthor. See also a more detailed documentation of codegradxagent Node module.

Installation

npm install codegradxvmauthor

When VMauthor runs, you should memorize the IP number attributed to that VM, this is required to access the VM. You may alternatively enrich your /etc/hosts file and add a line defining vmauthor.codegradx.org to be that IP number. Something like

192.168.133.201  vmauthor vmauthor.codegradx.org

If this hostname is not defined, you should use the --ip=192.168.133.201 option in your invocations of the codegradxvmauthor script.

Use

You may access the VMauthor virtual machine when browsing http://vmauthor/, interactively submit new exercises and test them as a student. However you may also prefer to script these interactions in which case, your script requires some credentials to access VMauthor.

Credentials

Credentials are JSON files that may be fetched from VMauthor. These files define a user name and a cookie (valid a few hours):

wget -O fw4ex-author.json   http://vmauthor/fw4exjson/0
wget -O fw4ex-student1.json http://vmauthor/fw4exjson/1

After getting these credentials you may use them with the --credentials=fw4ex-author.json or --credentials=fw4ex-student1.json option. Credentials are limited in time so you may additionally specify --update-credentials to refresh your credentials.

Actions

Students may submit answers to exercises. Only authors may create new exercises and mark batches of students' answers. See directory shtests/ for examples of use.