Apella

The electronic service Apella provides for the centralized management of faculty elections and promotions, as well as the compilation and maintenance of the registries of the internal and external evaluation members of the Greek Higher Educational Institutions.

Prerequisites

• Python 2.7
• git
• pip
• NodeJS
• Yarn

Development instructions

Backend installation

Getting the repo and installing dependencies

• Clone this repo and checkout to develop branch
• Install python dependencies (it's highly recommended to use a virtualenv)

$ pip install -r requirements.txt

Configuration

• Create a settings.conf file. The default path for it is /etc/apella. The path can be overriden by setting the APELLA_SETTINGS_DIR shell variable. This file overrides Django's settings.py and it should contain at least the following lines (change IP accordingly):

ALLOWED_HOSTS = [u'SERVICE.IP.HERE', u'127.0.0.1']
EMAIL_BACKEND = 'django.core.mail.backends.filebased.EmailBackend'
EMAIL_FILE_PATH = DATA_DIR

Consider also setting DEBUG and TEMPLATE_DEBUG to True.

• Create an apella.log file. The default path for it is /var/log/apella/apella.log. The path can be overriden by setting the APELLA_LOGFILE shell variable.
• Create a data folder for the uploaded files and sent emails. The default path for it is /var/lib/apella/data. The path can be overriden by setting the APELLA_DATA_DIR shell variable.
• The service also expects a resources directory at /usr/lib/apella/resources. Those resources can be found in the resources directory in the root folder of the repo. The path can be overriden by setting the APELLA_RESOURCES_DIR shell variable.

Database initialization

• Initialize database

$ python manage.py migrate

Running the server

• Use the following command:

$ python manage.py runserver

You can now view your api at http://127.0.0.1:8000/apella/api/

Adding dummy data (Optional)

• Before adding data you may alter the passwords of the users that will be created. To do so, create a json file with the passwords and set the APELLA_PASSWORD_FROM_JSON environment variable to point to it. An example file is passwords.json in the resources directory. The default username-password combinations are listed below:

helpdeskadmin : 12345
helpdeskuser  : 12345
manager       : 12345
manager2      : 12345
assistant     : 12345
assistant2    : 12345
assistant3    : 12345
candidate     : 12345
professor     : 12345
committee     : 12345

• To add dummy data to the database run the following command.

$ python run_transcript.py transcript.json

Frontend installation

Install requirements

• Install dependencies by running yarn

$ cd ui
$ yarn

• When yarn finishes, run bower install in order to install all bower components required (use the --allow-root option if required).

$ ./node_modules/.bin/bower install

• Build static files

$ ember build --watch --environment=development

You can now view the full app at http://127.0.0.1:8000/

Screenshots

Below are some screenshots from an existing installation of Apella. You can view the login and the register pages, as well as a list of all open and posted positions that a candidate can view and a position creation form for an institution manager.

Login

Register

Positions list

Position create screen

Copyright and license

Copyright (C) 2017-2018 GRNET S.A.

This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU Affero General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU Affero General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU Affero General Public License along with this program. If not, see http://www.gnu.org/licenses/.