discovery

Discovery tool for Open Badges

Quick Start

With mongo running locally…

npm install
echo '{  
  "url": "http://localhost:3000",
  "cookie": {
    "secret": "macadamianuts"
  },
  "database": {
    "app": "mongodb://127.0.0.1:27017/app",
    "test": "mongodb://127.0.0.1:27017/test"
  }
}' > config.json
DEV=1 node app

Then navigate to http://localhost:3000.

This app can also be deployed to Heroku.

Configuration

Parameters

Available app parameters are:

• COOKIE_SECRET: required Should be a large, unguessable string.
• URL: required The url (protocol, host, port) where your app lives. This is used as the Persona audience, and must match what you see in your browser’s url bar exactly.
• DATABASE_APP: required Mongo url for your app database.
• DATABASE_TEST: optional Mongo url for your test database, required if you want to run tests.
• PORT: optional Port the server will run on. Defaults to 3000.
• DEV: optional Run in development mode. Defaults to false.
• NEWRELIC_KEY: optional Your newrelic license key, if you have one. Setting this turns on New Relic logging.
• NEWRELIC_NAME: optional Your app name in New Relic.
• NEWRELIC_LOG_LEVEL: optional The log level to use.

Alternatives

Configuration parameters can be provided via commandline arguments, a config.json file, or environment variables.

For example, node app --cookieSecret=macadamianuts or adding a config.json with the contents:

{
  "cookie": {
    "secret": "macadamianuts"
  }
}

are equivalent to setting COOKIE_SECRET in the environment.

See js-config-store for more information.

Developers

Data Setup

app/fake-data.js is currently defunct. You can run node app/google-data to wipe the app database and load in initial data from a Google spreadsheet as detailed below.

Google spreadsheet data

The Google data reader makes many assumptions about the format of the spreadsheet. In general to load data this way:

• set the following configuration:
  • GOOGLE_EMAIL: the email address of an account with read access on the spreadsheet
  • GOOGLE_PASSWARD: the password for the same account
  • GOOGLE_KEY: the spreadsheet key, found in the url
    • e.g. https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key={THIS IS THE KEY}&usp=drive_web#gid=0 ^†
• build your spreadsheet as follows
  • define your badges using as many sheets as you would like with the following column names
    • Badge name: name
    • Description: description
    • Tags: comma-separated list of tags
    • Creator: creator
    • Image file: url of badge image
    • Criteria: criteria as HTML^‡
    • Keeping: rows with a blank cell here will be skipped
  • define your pathways, one sheet per pathway with the following column names
    • Name: name
    • Description: description
    • Image file: url of pathway image
    • Tags: comma-separated list of tags
    • Creator: creator
    • Badge name: name of badge to include in pathway
    • X: x position on grid, starting at 0
    • Y: y position on grid, starting at 0
    • Core: any value here indicates this badge is core to this pathway
    • Note title: title of note
    • Note body: body of note
  • on the first line, fill out Name through Creator
  • for each badge in the pathway, fill out Badge name through Core
  • for each note in the pathway, fill out X, Y, Note title, and Note body
  • make sure all pathway sheets have the word “pathway” in the sheet name

^† This is an older style of Google spreadsheet url, YMMV on the newer updated style.

^‡ This mimics retreiving the criteria url a badge would normally provide and parsing the content there to retrieve an HTML snippet for display.

Precommit Hooks

At the moment this project is using precommit-hook to run jshint and tests before commits. Feel free to propose changes to the jshint configuration; it is by no means final.

It also runs bin/beautify --warn which will report files that don’t live up to formatting conventions, but currently will not fail the validation step. Run bin/beautify -h for a help statement.

Development Mode

Development mode can be enabled to rebuild CSS, recompile templates and rebuild the clientside JS, unminified, on each request.

This should NOT be turned on for production.