The Odin Project: Learn Web Development for Free

v0.2.0

This site provides the main user experience for The Odin Project, including the home page and all user functions. It is meant to be a shell around The Curriculum and to include the tools that help students learn more effectively along their learning journeys.

The website has been open-sourced to provide both a learning resource for students who want to see how the tools they're using are built and to give students the opportunity to stretch their wings and contribute to a real open-sourced project... while building the tools they themselves will be using.

For minor fixes, either submit a github issue or a pull request. Please coordinate with the project maintainers if you're interested in working on some of the larger features in order to avoid traffic jams.

http://theodinproject.com/

Contact us directly at project@theodinproject.com

Contributing to the Site

This project is emphatically beginner-friendly so, if you're interested in potentially contributing, take a look at the Contributing Page on the website for more information.

Hacking on the Site Yourself: Getting Set Up

This site runs on Ruby 2.3 and Rails 4.2 (upgraded from Ruby 1.9.3 and Rails 3.2.12 in February 2014)

Installing the Site on your Local Machine

1. Make sure to fork this repo
2. When you have it cloned to your local machine make sure your Ruby version is 2.3 and your Rails version is 4.1 or later.
3. Use the appropriate operating system focused guide below to install the site

OSX Setup

Linux Setup

Populating the Database

3. The db/seeds.rb file is used to populate all the course and lesson meta-data. Use the command $ rake db:seed to populate all the meta-data for courses and lessons so you can run the rake task in the next step. db/seeds.rb is identical to the data you'll see presented on the production site (this is used to populate it). You can run it as many times as you'd like... it basically deletes all metadata and repopulates it with each run. The seeds file only creates curriculum data, it doesn't create any users.

4. One thing the seeds file will not populate is the actual content for each lesson. This needs to be retrieved from the curriculum repository on github (which is at http://www.github.com/theodinproject/curriculum) by running the rake task ($ rake curriculum:update_content). But there's a catch... Github only allows you something like 50 API calls per hour if you haven't registered for an API key with them and used it to authenticate your requests. As of this writing, there are over 170 lessons so you would be rate limited before even finishing populating them with the rake task if you don't get an API key yourself. So go get an API key from github (at https://github.com/settings/tokens) and use Figaro (as described below) to pass that key to the application so you can happily download all the curriculum files into your build.

5. The Github API call relies on private environment variables (to store their API secret keys) that you won't find in the repo. I upload them directly to the server myself using the figaro gem and a corresponding file called application.yml that's located in my config/ directory but not checked into git (no, you can't have my passwords). Check out the Figaro Documentation for a very easy-to-understand explanation of how the gem works. You basically just need to run $ rails generate figaro:install and populate the missing variables to application.yml. An example, as of this writing:

6.  # config/application.yml --set up this token to make API calls to get all the lessons.
    GITHUB_API_TOKEN: your_token_would_go_here
   
    # ~OPTIONAL~
    # config/application.yml --acquire this on your github account, through settings/applications/ and set up a new application.This is to make OAUTH Authentication (signin with github) function correctly.
    GITHUB_APP_ID: API_ID_Generated_with_registering_application
    GITHUB_SECRET: ALSO_GENERATAED_WITH_REGISTERING_APPLICATION
   

7. Run a $ rails server and see if that lets you check out the app at http://localhost:3000.

8. That... should... be... it...?

This is basically all you need to get yourself set up with the repo and you should be able to run a server with $ rails s or the tests with $ rspec spec. Of course, nothing ever goes according to plan when installing things but hopefully your "Googling the error message" skills are up to the task.

Please let me know what I've missed here!

Now that you're up and running... Come Help Out!

Significant Contributors

• Erik Trautman
• Afshin Moktari
• Josh Gorchov
• Joe Sawyer
• Bill Walker
• Neil Gehani
• Ian White
• Nathan Hall
• Abby Jones
• Kevin Mulhern

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Created by [Erik Trautman](http://www.github.com/eriktrautman)