Doenet web services

View a live demo at https://doenet.github.io/library-demo/

What is this?

Doenet web services powers the Doenet JavaScript library, which provides

• identity in a FERPA-protected manner
• progress reporting, i.e., scores for a gradebook or LMS
• xAPI event logging, i.e., statements stored in an LRS
• page state synchronization

This is embedded in a broader RESTful API which understands learners, instructors, courses, assignments, etc., and which is what powers the Doenet Atlas.

Dependencies

Besides node and the like, this service depends on redis and mongodb.

Running the server

To test this in a development environment, you should create a .env file for dotenv. This might look as follows for development.

PORT=4000
NODE_ENV=development
        
MONGODB_DATABASE=lrs
MONGODB_PASS=thepassword
MONGODB_USER=theuser
MONGODB_HOST=localhost
MONGODB_PORT=27017

REDIS_HOST=localhost
REDIS_PORT=27017
REDIS_PASS=thepassword
SECRET=some.shared.secret

Look at @doenet's devops repo to see how this is deployed in a production setting with multiple VMs.

In production, the backend is built via a nix expression called default.nix which uses the pinned packages in yarn.nix; this relies on running yarn2nix, specifically

yarn2nix > yarn.nix

to capture the contents of yarn.lock in a format suitable for Nix.