To get started using exercism.io to practice or provide feedback on other people's code, check out the getting started page on the website.
To report a bug, suggest improvements to exercism.io, or if you're having trouble installing or using the CLI, please open a GitHub issue.
You can also visit our support chat. We're just getting started with this, so activity is quite low, but the more people chat there, the more people will hang out.
If you're having trouble writing the code for an exercise on exercism.io, then your best bet might be StackOverflow. Remember to search first, before posting, and remember that you're asking about the programming language problem, not the exercism problem.
Another option is to submit the code even though it doesn't pass the tests yet, and then go to your submission page to explain where you're stuck.
We welcome questions, and will do our best to help you out!
Follow us on Twitter @exercism_io.
Jump in and chat with other exercism enthusiasts on the #exercism channel on irc.freenode.net. It's not a very active channel, but we're a friendly bunch.
For occasional updates, such as new language tracks being launched, sign up for the newsletter.
Exercism.io was started by Katrina. To get in touch with her, send an email to [email protected].
Exercism.io is free and open source, and many, many people have contributed to the project by:
- Reporting, reproducing, or fixing bugs
- Triaging issues
- Suggesting, discussing, or implementing features
- Refactoring
- Improving the design of the site
- Adding tests
- Improving documentation
- Improving test suites for the language tracks
- Adding new problems to existing tracks
- Porting problems to new tracks
- Providing feedback on people's code
- Reviewing pull requests
- ... and more
This is a project that started by accident and could never have gotten off the ground by the efforts of any single person.
Thank you!
If you would like to contribute to exercism, then please read the CONTRIBUTING.md document, which describes the various parts of the system and how they fit together.
We are working to improve this document, and if you find any part of it confusing, or if you can't figure out how to get started with something, then rest assured it's not you, it's us! Please open up a new issue to describe what you were hoping to contribute with, and what you're wondering about, and we'll figure out together how to improve the documentation.
We're trying to label issues with "good first patch" if we think that these can be solved without too much context about exercism.io's codebase or functionality. To find them, you can do an organization-wide search.
If you'd like to do work on the exercism.io app, then you'll need to have it running locally.
For working on the backend you'll need both Ruby and PostgreSQL. Frontend development uses Node.js.
To install Ruby, check out RVM, rbenv or ruby-install.
PostgreSQL can be installed with Homebrew on Mac OS X: brew install postgresql
If you're on a Linux system with apt-get then run: apt-get install postgresql postgresql-contrib
Install Node.js and npm on Mac OS X with Homebrew: brew install node
On other systems see the Node.js docs.
In order to be able to log into your local version of the application, you will need to create some keys on GitHub that the app can talk to.
Go to https://github.com/settings/applications/new and enter the following:
- Application name: You can name it whatever you want. I have Exercism (Dev).
- Homepage URL: http://localhost:4567
- Authorization callback URL: http://localhost:4567/github/callback
Click Register application, and you'll see something like this:
Later you will add the Client ID and Client Secret to a configuration file.
If you're unfamiliar with git and GitHub, don't worry. We'll gladly help you out if you get stuck. GitHub also has some helpful guides for getting started.
First, you need to get ahold of the code, so you have a copy of it locally that you can make changes to.
- Fork this codebase to your own GitHub account.
- Clone your fork, and change directory into the root of the exercism.io project.
- If you use a Ruby version manager such as RVM, rbenv or chruby, then:
cp .ruby-version.example .ruby-version
- Copy the environment config:
cp config/env .env
- Open
.env
and add the Client ID and Client Secret from the previous GitHub OAuth steps.
All the commented out values in .env
can be left alone for now.
You don't need to fill in the values for email stuff unless you're going to be working on the emails specifically.
You don't need to fill in the EXERCISES_API value unless you're going to be working on the x-api codebase.
Next, make sure all the application dependencies are installed:
- Install gems with:
bundle install
Finally, set up the database. This means both creating the underlying database, and migrating so that it has all the correct tables. Also run a script to add fake data, so there are things to click on and look at while working on the app.
- Do all of it in one go:
rake db:from_scratch
Alternatively (or to debug if the above blows up), do it one-by-one:
- Create the PostgreSQL database:
rake db:setup
- Run the database migrations:
rake db:migrate
- Fetch the seed data:
rake db:seeds:fetch
- Seed the database:
rake db:seed
The seed data gives you a bunch of fake user accounts with submissions in multiple languages as well as fake comments. In development mode there is an "Assume" menu item to the far right of the nav bar. This will let you easily assume different fake identities to see the site from their perspective.
- Start the server with:
foreman s -p 4567
- Sometimes you need to:
bundle exec foreman s -p 4567
- Then you can access the local server at localhost:4567.
- You can log in as a test user using the
assume
dropdown menu on the top right of the page without creating any new user for the app.
Lineman watches for file changes and compiles them automatically. It is not required to be running for the server to run though.
- Install Lineman with:
npm install -g lineman
- To run:
cd frontend
and start Lineman withlineman run
- Start Compass with:
compass watch
- To compile:
compass compile
For CSS we are using Sass (with .scss
). Feel free to use Bootstrap 3 components and mixins. Or if you want to use even more mixins you can use Compass. Structurewise we try to separate components, mixins and layouts. Where layouts should be a single page (using an HTML id as a selector) and components should be reusable partials, which can look different by layout.
You can find the Compass configuration in config.rb
in the project's root directory.
Our styleguide is under /styleguide and built with KSS, which enables you to write examples to *.scss
files.
MailCatcher is used to catch and view emails locally.
Do the following to test an email:
- Start MailCatcher:
mailcatcher
ormailcatcher -f
to run in the foreground - Send a test message. For example,
ruby test/services/notification_message_test.rb
will send a test notification email. - Open localhost:1080 and you should see the test email
If you want to send emails, you will need to fill out the relevant environment variables in .env
and uncomment the lines so the variables get exported.
There's a script in bin/console
that will load pry with the exercism environment loaded.
This will let you poke around at the objects in the system, such as finding users and changing
things about submissions or comments, making it easier to test specific things.
user = User.find_by_username 'whatever'
user.submissions
- Create and migrate a test database:
RACK_ENV=test rake db:setup db:migrate
- Make sure MailCatcher is running:
mailcatcher
- Run the test suite:
rake
orrake test
To run a single test suite, you can do so with:
ruby path/to/the_test.rb
If it complains about dependencies, then either we forgot to require the correct dependencies (a distinct possibility), or we are dependening on a particular tag of a gem installed directly from GitHub (this happens on occasion).
If there's a git dependency, you can do this:
bundle exec ruby path/to/the_test.rb
For the require, you'll need to figure out what the missing dependency is. Feel free to open a GitHub issue. It's likely that someone familiar with the codebase will be able to identify the problem immediately.
To enable code coverage run:
COVERAGE=1 rake test
Browse the results located in coverage/index.html
Let Heroku know that Lineman will be building our assets. From the command line:
heroku config:set BUILDPACK_URL=https://github.com/testdouble/heroku-buildpack-lineman-ruby.git
GNU Affero General Public License
Copyright (C) 2015 Katrina Owen, [email protected]
This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU Affero General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.
This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU Affero General Public License for more details.