codex-blackboard

Meteor app for coordating solving for our MIT Mystery Hunt team. To run, first obtain the password for our google drive account. Then:

$ cd codex-blackboard
$ echo '{ "password":"<password here>" }' > private/settings.json
$ meteor --settings private/settings.json
<browse to localhost:3000>

If you don't have the google drive password, you can just omit the private/settings.json file and the --settings option to meteor; the app will skip all the google drive integration steps.

Your code is pushed live to the server as you make changes, so you can just leave meteor running. Occassionally we make changes to the database schema -- add new sample data, change how things are organized, etc. In those cases:

$ meteor reset
$ meteor --settings private/settings.json

will wipe the old database and start afresh.

Note that MongoDB changed its default database format between meteor 1.3.x and 1.4.x. See the "Database upgrade" section below to learn about migrating the meteor database if you are doing an upgrade.

Installing Meteor

Our blackboard app currently requires Meteor 1.4.

At the moment the two ways to install Meteor are:

• just make a git clone of the meteor repo and put it in $PATH, or
• use the package downloaded by their install shell script

The latter option is easier, and automatically downloads the correct version of meteor and all its dependencies, based on the contents of codex-blackboard/.meteor/release. Simply cross your fingers, trust in the meteor devs, and do:

$ curl https://install.meteor.com | /bin/sh

You can read the script and manually install meteor this way as well; it just involves downloading a binary distribution and installing it in ~/.meteor.

If piping stuff from the internet directly to /bin/sh gives you the willies, then you can also run from a git checkout. Something like:

$ cd ~/3rdParty
$ git clone git://github.com/meteor/meteor.git
$ cd meteor
$ git checkout release/[email protected]
$ cd ~/bin ; ln -s ~/3rdParty/meteor/meteor .

Meteor can run directly from its checkout, and figure out where to find the rest of its files itself --- but it only follows a single symlink to its binary; a symlink can't point to another symlink. If you use a git checkout, you will be responsible for updating your checkout to the latest version of meteor when codex-blackboard/.meteor/release changes.

You should probably watch the screencast at http://meteor.com to get a sense of the framework; you might also want to check out the examples they've posted, too.

Working with Google Drive

We use JWT for authenticating with google drive. The official documentation is a bit sparse. I suggest you read the docs for the gapitoken package which describes how to make a .pem private key file for the service account associated with this app. In order to avoid publicly exposing the private key in github, we then encrypt this private key file with a password, stored in private/settings.json but not checked in. The server-side Gapi.encrypt function (in packages/googleapis/googleapis.js) can be used to create a properly encrypted key if the credentials or password ever needs to change.

For development, it is useful to have a scratch drive folder which is specific to your development install and can be wiped out and reset. Add a folder key to your private/settings.json file to name this scratch folder. For example: {"password":"","folder":"My Dev Test Folder"}

Database upgrade

MongoDB changed its default database format to "WiredTiger" between meteor 1.3.x and 1.4.x. See: https://docs.meteor.com/changelog.html#v14

To migrate the meteor database format, first ensure that you have mongodump installed (apt-get install mongo-tools if necessary).

Ensure meteor is running your app before starting the dump:

$ meteor --settings private/settings.json &
$ mongodump -h 127.0.0.1 --port 3001 -d meteor

Then stop meteor and reset the DB (which will create a DB of the new type):

$ meteor reset

Start up meteor again, and restore the DB into the new storage engine:

$ meteor --settings private/settings.json &
$ mongorestore --maintainInsertionOrder -h 127.0.0.1 --port 3001 -d meteor --drop dump/meteor

If your version of mongorestore is "old", then you might have to drop the --maintainInsertionOrder argument to the mongorestore command.

The machine we've been using for the hunt has an "old" mongodump, so we've been taking and restoring the backups over an ssh tunnel:

$ ssh remotehost -L 3001:localhost:3001

Goals, etc.

The following links should give you a sense of the functionality we're attempting to reimplement (talk to us if you need a reminder of the login and password for these):

• http://codex.hopto.org/codex/wiki/All_Puzzles11
• http://codex.hopto.org/codex/wiki/2011_R1P1
• http://codex.hopto.org/show.asp?roomname=r10meta
• http://codex.hopto.org/codex/wiki/Chat_System#Chat_Bot