UCSD Planner Helper

Live at sdschedule.com! Designed for and by UCSD students. Use this tool to automatically generate your optimal class schedule without relying on WebReg.

Details

UCSD's class registration system, WebReg, is notoriously slow and clunky. During peak hours, students trying to plan their classes on WebReg might find themselves unable to proceed, stuck waiting for a simple search query to load. Everything about WebReg is extremely dated, from its outmoded user interface to the bare minimum of features that it supports. Most importantly, WebReg lacks the ability to generate schedules automatically, requiring users to manually add each of their prospective classes themselves.

In this project, we attempted to address these concerns. Our planning tool allows UCSD students to automatically generate schedules given a list of classes that they are interested in. Students can indicate at what times they would prefer certain classes and can specify class priorities. All of the schedule generation legwork is handled by our system. Additionally, we boast extremely fast load times, a clean, modern UI and near 100% uptime. This schedule generation tool also integrates with calendar frameworks like Google Calendar and Apple Calendar, enabling students to export their new schedule to the device of their choice.

_{^{Note that the user must manually enroll in classes on WebReg itself; we only provide schedule generation utilities, not enrollment features.}}

Primary Technologies

This project uses the following frameworks:

• ReactJS and Redux _{frontend logic}
• React Storybook _{component testing}
• Primereact _{UI components}
• Flask _{backend server}
• Selenium _{web scraping}
• Cheerio _{HTML parsing}
• MySQL _{database for scraped results}
• Docker _{container management}

The frontend is mostly written in JS, by virtue of React, and the backend is mostly written in Python.

System Requirements

The following utilities must be present for installation purposes:

• docker
• docker-compose

Installation

This project is designed to be portable. We use docker to ensure that there is clear separation between our tool's runtime environment and the rest of your system.

To clone, use the following command:

git clone https://github.com/ctrando/UCSD-Planner-Helper
cd UCSD-Planner-Helper

Run this app using a simple shell script:

• To download the data, add "-d" flag. Note the scraping might take a while depends on your network environment.
• The app can be either run in development mode or production mode. Production mode uses Nginx.
• If any changes made to the files (e.g. update), add "-b" flag to tell docker to rebuild. Otherwise docker will always use the images existing.
• "-s" flag is used to stop the detached services in production mode.

./scripts/run.sh [-h|--help] [-d|--download] [-p|--production] [-b|--build] [-s|--stop] [-c|--cert <email>]

Usage:

./scripts/run.sh -h                 # display help message

./scripts/run.sh                    # run in development mode without reloading or rebuilding
./scripts/run.sh -d                 # run in development mode and download the data
./scripts/run.sh -p                 # run the app in production mode
./scripts/run.sh -p -d              # run the app in production mode, and download data
./scripts/run.sh -b -p -d           # rebuild, run the app in production mode, and download data

./scripts/run.sh -s                 # stop the running production mode services
                                    # give error if production services not started properly
./scripts/run.sh -c input@your.mail # FIRST FIRST PRODUCTION RUN ONLY
                                    # generate a letsencrypt cert using given email

The development server will be live at http://localhost:3000. Make sure the ports 3000 and 5000 are not used on your machine.

The production server will listen to 80 and 443 ports (ssl enabled by default).

Production Mode

In production, the docker services are run as detached daemons.

Check status:

docker ps
docker logs <service-name>

Service name can be:

sdschedule-backend   sdschedule-certbot   sdschedule-database  sdschedule-frontend  sdschedule-web

Graceful stop detached services:

• ./scripts/run.sh -s is just a shortcut for this

docker-compose -f docker-compose-production.yml down

SSL

Add https (Let's Encrypt):

./scripts/run.sh -p                 # make sure the production services are up
                                    # recommend wait for a minute or so
./scripts/run.sh -c <your-email>    # give an email address

If you don't want to use https, change the nginx config file, UCSD-Planner-Helper\web\nginx\sites\sdschedule.conf, as specified in that file.

Contributing

If you wish to contribute, please speak to @ctrando. We emphasize good testing practices as well as maintainable and well-documented code. Contributing guidelines will be posted in the near future.

#Credits SVGs taken from Heroicons UI: https://github.com/sschoger/heroicons-ui