MarkUs (pronounced "mark us") is an open-source tool which recreates the ease and flexibility of grading assignments with pen on paper, within a web application. It also allows students and instructors to form groups, and collaborate on assignments. Its predecessor OLM (Online Marking) was originally written in Python on top of the TurboGears framework.
The MarkUs-VM project aimed at facilitating MarkUs installation, both in production (with nginx as webserver and unicorn as ruby backend) or in development mode (with latest ruby and subversion build).
This project uses both Vagrant and Chef.
The virtual machine is provisionned by Chef Solo to contain everything needed to start MarkUs. Vagrant is used as a wrapper to manipulate the virtual machine. You can still access the virtual machine using VirtualBox GUI.
- Install Virtual Box <https://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Downloads>
- Install Vagrant: http://www.vagrantup.com/downloads.html
- Create an account on Github and configure a SSH key
- Clone the MarkUs-VM repository and update submodules with git clone https://github.com/benjaminvialle/MarkUs-VM.git and git submodule update --init
- Create a symbolic link called Vagrant file and pointing to Vagrantfile.development or Vagrantfile.production to Vagrantfile (according to the mode you want to use)
- Ensure you have properly forked MarkUs (on Github) repository and clone your MarkUs repository to ../Markus on your computer (you can modify the path to your Markus local repository in Vagrantfile (see the config.vm.share_folder option in Vagrantfile).
- 6a. Ensure config/database.yml is provided for Postgresql database with
markus/markus as user/password.
- Start the build of your virtual machine using vagrant up command in the directory where the Vagrantfile is. The first time you run the vagrant up command, it can take a long time (your virtual machine will compile both subversion and ruby)
- Once your virtual machine is up, you can access it using vagrant ssh command. Note: development must be done with markus user, not with vagrant user. You can log in with markus user by doing sudo su - markus once logged in with the vagrant user.
- Follow instructions on MarkUs' wiki to configure database access in
config/database.yml file. You can access Postgresql database using user 'markus' and password 'markus'.
- Run bundle exec rake db:create to create 'markus_development' database, then bundle exec rake db:schema:load to load database schema and finally bundle exec rake db:seed to populate database with faked datas. Note: these commands must be run from your MarkUs git repository, from the VM
- Please note that you will edit MarkUs source code on "your" computer, in the ../Markus directory and you will start the rails server on the virtual machine (using bundle exec rails server). Please refer to MarkUs documentation for more infos.
- You can stop the virtual machine by running vagrant halt from your host machine.
- MarkUsProject website: http://markusproject.org/
- MarkUs-VM website: http://github.com/benjaminvialle/MarkUs-VM
- VirtualBox: https://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Downloads