Runestone Interactive Tools and Content

Important Notice

On July 26, 2013 We made some structural changes which involved moving the three extisting submodules. skulpt, codelens, and js-parson. Submodules are a known PITA for many git operations. If you have an existing project here is what you should do.

1. git pull or follow the fetch instructions for your Fork.
2. git submodule init
3. git submodule sync
4. git submodule update

If you are Forking this repo for the first time, you can just proceed to the dependencies.

Dependencies

There are a couple of prerequisites you need to satisfy before you can build and use this eBook. The easiest/recommended way is to use pip.

First get Sphinx, version 1.1.x is current as of this writing:

# pip install sphinx

Install paver, at least version 1.2.0:

# pip install paver

Once paver is installed you will also need to install sphinxcontrib-paverutils, at least version 1.5:

# pip install sphinxcontrib-paverutils

If you want to run a full blown server, so you can save ActiveCode assignments, etc. you will need to download and install web2py.

The easiest way to do so is to download the "Source Code" distribution from http://www.web2py.com/init/default/download. Here is a direct link to the zip archive. After you download it, extract the zip file to some folder on your hard drive. (web2py requires no real "installation").

Within the web2py folder that was just extracted, go to the applications/ folder and check out this repository (instructions below). This will install the Runestone Tools as a web2py application automatically.

Cloning The Runestone Project and its submodules

This project consists of the main repository, plus submodules for codelens, parsons-problems, and skulpt. In order to get all of the source you need you will need to do the following:

$ git clone https://github.com/bnmnetp/runestone.git
$ cd runestone
$ git submodule init
$ git submodule update

If you are using a GUI git client you may simply get prompted to update the submodules and all will be taken care of for you. Newer versions of git also support:

$ git clone --recursive https://github.com/bnmnetp/runestone.git

Configure the Book

Although the book looks like a static website, there are quite a few AJAX calls going on in the background. The Javascript relies on a configuration object called eBookConfig. To get the right values in the eBookConfig object you need to configure a couple of things prior to running the paver command to build the book. We have provided a paverconfig.py.prototype file that you can simply copy to paverconfig.py and modify. It contains the following two lines:

master_url = 'http://127.0.0.1:8000'
master_app = 'runestone'

You can modify the master_url to be the hostname that you are running your app on, but if you are just doing local development you will probably want to leave it alone. If you omit this step the books will build in the next step using the values above as default values, but you will get a warning message:

'NOTICE:  You are using default values for master_* Make your own paverconfig.py file'

Building the Book

Once you the above installed, you can type paver allbooks from the command line and that will build the following targets:

• How to Think Like a Computer Scientist
• Problem Solving with algorithms and Data Structures using Python

You can quickly check the build by opening the file static/thinkcspy/index.html in your browser.

Now before you start web2py its convenient to make runestone the default application. In the top level web2py directory copy routes.example.py to routes.py and Modify the three lines that contain the word runestone to look like this:

default_application = 'runestone'    # ordinarily set in base routes.py
default_controller = 'default'  # ordinarily set in app-specific routes.py
default_function = 'index'      # ordinarily set in app-specific routes.py

# routes_app is a tuple of tuples.  The first item in each is a regexp that will
# be used to match the incoming request URL. The second item in the tuple is
# an applicationname.  This mechanism allows you to specify the use of an
# app-specific routes.py. This entry is meaningful only in the base routes.py.
#
# Example: support welcome, admin, app and myapp, with myapp the default:


    routes_app = ((r'/(?P<app>welcome|admin|app)\b.*', r'\g<app>'),
                  (r'(.*)', r'runestone'),
                  (r'/?(.*)', r'runestone'))

Running the Server

You will have to set a few configuration values in the file models/1.py. Copy models/1.py.prototype to models/1.py and open the newly created 1.py. If you don't wish to use a local SQLite database, change the database_uri to match your actual credentials.

If you wish to use Janrain Engage to provide social network authentication integration, you will also have to set your Janrain API key and domain in 1.py.

Note: If you do not wish to use Janrain, you must comment out these lines in models/0.db:

janrain_form = RPXAccount(request,
                          api_key=settings.janrain_api_key, # set in 1.py
                          domain=settings.janrain_domain, # set in 1.py
                          url=janrain_url)
auth.settings.login_form = ExtendedLoginForm(auth, janrain_form) # uncomment this to use both Janrain and web2py auth

and uncomment the line below. This will disable Janrain and only use Web2Py integrated authentication.

auth.settings.login_form = auth # uncomment this to just use web2py integrated authentication

Once you've built the book using the steps above. You can start the web2py development server by simply running

python web2py.py

This will bring up a little GUI where you can make up an admin password and click "start server". When the server is running your browser will open to the welcome application, unless you've changed the default application as described above. To see this app simply use the url: http://127.0.0.1/runestone From there, you can click on the link for "How To Think Like A Computer Scientist" or "Problem Solving With Algorithms and Data Structures". (See the section Final Configuration below for instructions on registering for one of the courses. Registering allows you to save your progress and work.)

If you get an error at this point the most likely reason is that the settings file isn't recognizing your host and is not setting the database correctly. These lines in models/0.py are important:

if 'local' in uname()[1] or 'Darwin' in uname()[0]:
    settings.database_uri = 'sqlite://storage.sqlite'
elif 'webfaction' in uname()[1]:  # production is on webfaction
    settings.database_uri = 'postgres://production_db:secret@production_server.com/production_db'
elif 'luther' in uname()[1]:   # this is my beta machine
    settings.database_uri = 'sqlite://storage.sqlite'
else:
    raise RuntimeError('Host unknown, settings not configured')

For your own personal development, you want the first clause of the if statement to match. If you are on a Unix-like system, you can replace 'Darwin' with the result of running uname at a terminal. Another option is to replace 'local' with your computer's hostname.

Final Configuration

To use the admin functionality you are going to want to do one more bit of configuration:

• Click the "Register" link in the user menu in the upper right corner of the browser window.
• Fill in the form to create a user account for yourself. You can register for either "How To Think..." (use the course name thinkcspy) or "Problem Solving With..." (use the course name pythonds).

Now, add your new user account to the 'instructors' group using the appadmin functionality of web2py:

• Open http://127.0.0.1:8000/runestone/appadmin. Login using the password you supplied when you ran web2py.
• Click on insert new auth_membership. Select your user account and the instructor group as the two values and click submit. You are now an instructor.

How to Contribute

1. Get a github (free) account.
2. Make a fork of this project. That will create a repository in your account for you to have read/write access to. Very nice, complete instructions for making a fork are here: https://help.github.com/articles/fork-a-repo
3. Clone the repository under your account to your local machine.
4. Check the issues list, or add your own favorite feature. commit and pull to your fork at will!
5. test
6. Make a Pull Request. This will notify me that I should look at your changes and merge them into the main repository.
7. Repeat!

How to Contribute $$

As our popularity has grown we have server costs. We were also able to make great progress during the Summer of 2013 thanks to a generous grant from ACM-SIGCSE that supported one of our undergraduate students. It would be great if we could have a student working on this all the time.

If this system or these books have helped you, please consider making a small donation using gittip

More Documentation

I have begun a project to document the Runestone Interactive tools

• All of the Runestone Interactive extensions to sphinx:

  • Activecode -- Interactive Python in the browser
  • Codelens -- Step through code examples and see variables change
  • mchoicemf -- multiple choice questions with feedback
  • mchoicema -- multiple choice question with multiple answers and multiple feedback
  • fillintheblank -- fill in the blank questiosn with regular expression matching answers
  • parsonsproblem -- drag and drop blocks of code to complete a simple programming assignment
  • datafile -- create datafiles for activecode

• How to write your own extension for Runestone Interactive

Creating Your Own Textbook

To find instructions on using the Runestone Tools to create your own interactive textbook, see the file in this directory named README_new_book.rst.

Browser Notes

Note, because this interactive edition makes use of lots of HTML 5 and Javascript I highly recommend either Chrome, or Safari. Firefox 6+ works too, but has proven to be less reliable than the first two. I have no idea whether this works at all under later versions of Internet Explorer.