leetforces

Description

Disclaimer: The leetforces team strongly recommends the developers not to use the project as a part of any high-risk project as it might contain some vulnerabilities that we (the leetforces team) did not encounter during the development and testing phase.

This project started as a course project for the System and Network Administration course at Innopolis University Spring 2023 semester, and then was redesigned and greatly improved for the Capstone Project course at Innopolis University Summer 2023 semester.

The project is an attempt to implement the service for end-user submission checking for the academia, i.e. for universities, schools, etc. The service provides modularity and extensibility by utilizing microservice architecture.

NB In the description below we distinguish 2 definitions: user and end-user. User stands for the member(s) of the technical support team, while end-users may be students of some educational organization.

Reference architecture

                           +-----------------+
                           |                 |
                           |   Database      |
                           |  (PostgreSQL)   |
                           |                 |
                           +--------+--------+
                                    |
                                    |
                                    |
  +-----------------+      +--------+--------+      +-----------------+
  |                 |      |                 |      |                 |
  |                 |      |                 |      |                 |
  |  Orchestrator   +------+     Juggler     +------+    Frontend     |
  |                 |      |                 |      |                 |
  |                 |      |                 |      |                 |
  +--------+--------+      +-----------------+      +-----------------+
           |
           |
           |
 +---------+---------+
 |                   |
 |   Test runner /   |
 |   Test generator  |
 |                   |
 +-------------------+

As depicted above, the project consists of several modules:
- Frontend - the service which provides interaction with user
- Juggler (aka backend) - the service which handles requests from frontend and forwards them according to their destination
- Orchestrator - the service which manages test generation and user submission execution and checking

The links between services are to show how they communicate within project, in reality, there are several distinct networks: one for orchestrator and its services, one for orchestrator and juggler, and one for juggler and frontend. Such complex network partitioning is made with considerations of security and logical separation.

Frontend

Provides neat UI for end-user by utilizing the capabilities of the Flutter framework, communicates with juggler to retrieve and send user information.

Juggler (aka backend)

Provides extensive API for task storing and retrieval, communicating with the database (PostgreSQL) storage and forwarding user submissions to the Orchestrator service.

Orchestrator (not k8s, haha)

Provides 1 API route for user submissions, depends itself on DockerAPI for communicating with Docker daemon to start worker containers. The additional user submission container isolation is made for the security and modularity reasons.

Technology stack

Docker, docker-compose, GitHub actions CI/CD, PostgreSQL, Dart, Flutter, Python, XMLRPC, nginx.

Deployment

We have deployed containers to the GitHub Container registry using GitHub Actions for the sake of user convenience.

Installation

• Install docker-compose and docker packages according to your operating systems guidelines first.
• Clone the project GitHub repository

Usage

To build & run the project run in the project root directory

docker-compose up

And then you can access the site on the http://localhost:8000/

License

Licensed under MIT open license. The leetforces team @ 2023.