The instructions below will setup an instance of Submitty on your own hardware that will have several courses, many sample assignments, and a hundred students with assignment submissions so you can explore the features of Submitty as it would appear “mid-semester”. Your host computer can run any modern operating system (Windows, Mac, or Unix/Linux). The installation process will create a new Virtual Machine (VM) on your computer and the VM will use the Ubuntu GNU/Linux operating system.
Note: We only officially support and test development using VirtualBox. The instructions below are for VirtualBox. While alternatively using VMWare should work, we have not tested this, and do not provide these instructions.
Pre-Installation Checklist
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To develop with a Virtual Machine (VM), your computer should have at least 8GB of RAM and a 64-bit host OS. AMD-V or Intel VT-x are also required (most computers have these). Submitty is RAM and I/O intensive, so more RAM and a fast disk are better.
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Make sure you have at least 20GB of hard disk available for installation. We do not recommend installing the Submitty Developer VM on DropBox, OneDrive, GoogleDrive, or other cloud storage.
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Some developers have had problems running both VirtualBox and VMWare on the same computer. If you have problems, we suggest shutting down the VMWare VMs, or stopping the VMWare services, or uninstalling VMWare.
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If you’re running Windows, it is recommended to disable Hyper-V. Leaving it enabled will force VirtualBox to use the Hyper-V backend, which will be slower and can cause instability in the VM.
Note: This may stop programs like Docker Desktop and WSL 2 from working. If these programs are essential to your workflow, consider looking up how to add a separate boot entry with “hypervisorlaunchtype” set to “off” for use with VirtualBox.
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The complete installation process could take an hour or more. Make sure your internet connection is strong and consistent. You’ll probably want to plug in your laptop power cord. Check your computer settings and make sure the machine does not hibernate or go to sleep during installation.
Submitty Developer VM Installation
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Enable Virtualization
MacOS
- Virtualization is generally enabled by default.
Windows 10
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Open the Settings app by searching for it in the windows bar or clicking it in the Windows menu.
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Navigate to Update and Security, then select Recovery from the side menu.
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Under Advanced Startup, click Restart Now.
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Once your PC has rebooted, click the Troubleshoot option.
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Click Advanced Options.
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Click UEFI Firmware Settings and restart as suggested.
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Enter your BIOS (generally by pressing Del, F12, or other keys while booting). If you are not able to find the key combo needed to enter your BIOS, refer to this guide.
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Locate Virtualization, and enable it. (Note: If you cannot find the option to enable virtualization, search Google for a tutorial on enabling it with your motherboard.)
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Reboot your computer.
Ubuntu
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Enter your BIOS (generally by pressing Del, F12, or other keys while booting).
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Navigate the BIOS Settings.
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Locate Virtualization and enable it.
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Be sure to choose Hardware Virtualization in the System -> Acceleration settings of the virtual machine you are using.
NOTE If using secure boot, vagrant may fail to work with VirtualBox. You will then either need to disable secure boot from the boot menu/BIOS or follow these steps to self-sign the necessary packages to run vagrant and VirtualBox.
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Download and install the latest version of Ruby.
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Download and install the latest version of Git.
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Download and install VirtualBox and Vagrant
Below are quick steps to get everything installed and running.
Windows 10
- You can just go to the respective sites and download the necessary binaries.
MacOS
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You can either go to respective sites and download the necessary binaries or install homebrew if you don’t have it and then run:
brew cask install virtualbox brew cask install vagrant
Ubuntu/Debian
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The Ubuntu repository does not contain the latest version of Vagrant or VirtualBox and using them may not work nor are they supported. We recommend that you either download the necessary binaries from their respective steps or follow the steps outlined below for each:
VirtualBox: https://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Linux_Downloads
Vagrant: https://vagrant-deb.linestarve.com/
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Install vagrant-vbguest.
Open your terminal/cmd.exe and run:
vagrant plugin install vagrant-vbguest
Note: You will want to run
vagrant plugin update
every once in a while to keep the plugin up-to-date. -
Clone the Submitty repository to a location on your computer (the “host”).
git clone https://github.com/Submitty/Submitty.git
NOTE: If you are not currently part of the Submitty organization on Github, you may want to fork the repo and use the git url from your fork instead, especially if you are looking to contribute.
OPTIONAL: If you will be developing code in one of the companion Submitty repositories (e.g., AnalysisTools, Lichen, RainbowGrades, Tutorial), also clone those repositories to the same directory. For example:
home └── myusername └── Submitty └── GIT_CHECKOUT ├── AnalysisTools (optional) ├── Lichen (optional) ├── RainbowGrades (optional) ├── Submitty └── Tutorial (optional)
This host directory structure will be shared / synced between your host operating system and the Submitty virtual machine.
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Navigate into the Submitty repository on your computer in a shell/terminal and type:
Windows should run CMD or powershell on administrator mode
vagrant up
Vagrant will build your VM. This will take maybe 30 minutes to a few hours depending on your Internet connection speed. When this command finishes, your VM is ready to use.
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When the
vagrant up
command completes successfully, you will be able to access the Submitty website (instructions follow in the next section).The VM will continue to run jobs in the background and consume a nontrivial amount of CPU resources, while completing a backlog of autograding for a dozen or more sample submissions for each of the more than 100 users in the sample courses.
If your development work will not require sample assignment submissions or autograding results, you may prepend
NO_SUBMISSIONS=1
to the previous command, which will skip the creation of these sample submissions and their autograding and decrease the time to complete installation.NO_SUBMISSIONS=1 vagrant up
Using your Submitty Developer VM
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When the VM is “up”, you can go visit the homework submission website.
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From a web browser (Chrome, Firefox, IE, etc.) on your host computer, go to:
http://localhost:1501/index.php
(see the VM login & password info below)
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You can test the submission, autograding, and viewing of the grades details by uploading sample submissions from the Submitty repository, located in one of these these directories:
For the “tutorial” course:
https://github.com/Submitty/Tutorial/tree/main/examplesFor the “sample” course:
https://github.com/Submitty/Submitty/tree/master/more_autograding_examples
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When the VM is “up”, you can connect from your host computer to the virtual machine via ssh. Windows users will need to install SSH software (e.g., WSL, or Cygwin, or Putty ). From a terminal in the repository directory type:
vagrant ssh
You will connect to the VM as the
root
user.If
vagrant ssh
asks for a password for the root@127.0.0.1 user and “vagrant” without the quotation marks does not work, look at the vagrant ssh config file and make note of the hostname and port.vagrant ssh-config
Then directly ssh into the VM by
ssh vagrant@hostname -p port
If it asks for password, it should be “vagrant” and then
sudo su
to login as the root user. You should then see you are logged in as root@vagrant.
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The following users exist on the VM:
user password role vagrant vagrant OS user root vagrant OS user submitty_cgi submitty_cgi Submitty process submitty_php submitty_php Submitty process submitty_daemon submitty_daemon Submitty process postgres postgres database process instructor instructor Submitty user ta ta Submitty user student student Submitty user -
The VM has the following four courses by default and they are all part of the current semester:
- tutorial
- sample
- development
- blank
Note: The current semester is calculated by either using an
s
if in the month is < 7 else usef
and then take the last two digits of the current year. So April 2017 would bes17
while September 2017 would bef17
.
Starting and Stopping the Submitty VM
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When you take a break from Submitty development work, you can suspend the Submitty VM to to save resources (CPU and battery) on your host machine.
vagrant suspend
Alternatively, you can halt the virtual machine. This is a more complete shutdown and will take slightly longer to restart when you resume development work.
vagrant halt
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To resume work on a VM that is suspended or halted:
vagrant up
NOTE: when resuming work, you may see this warning several times,
default: Warning: Remote connection disconnect. Retrying.. .
These warnings are not harmful and can be ignored. -
If you just want to restart the VM (same as
halt
thenup
), type:vagrant reload
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Read the Development Instructions page for instructions on updating an existing installation with recent code changes.
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To completely delete the virtual machine, type:
vagrant destroy
And if desired (to start over from scratch with a fresh VM):
vagrant up
Installation Troubleshooting
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If an error is thrown during
vagrant up
, you may need to uninstall Virtual Box and all virtual machines by typing the following commands:CAUTION: This should only be done if you do not have any other virtual machines.
To remove Virtual Box type:
sudo apt-get remove --purge virtualbox
To remove all virtual machines and configuration files type:
sudo rm ~/"VirtualBox VMs" -Rf sudo rm ~/.config/VirtualBox/ -Rf
This will delete all virtual machine settings. Then install the latest version of Virtual Box and vagrant from the links given in step 3 (using Ubuntu Software).
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If it has been a while since your last
vagrant destroy
andvagrant up
you may need to update/upgrade/reinstall the virtual box, vagrant, vagrant vb-guest, and the installed boxes on your system:For example, on Mac:
brew cask reinstall virtualbox brew cask reinstall vagrant vagrant plugin update vagrant box update
Similar instructions for other OS.