EnglishPal - Learn English Words Smartly

Hui Lan hui.lan@cantab.net

1 November 2019

What is it?

EnglishPal allows the user to build his list of new English words picked from articles selected for him to read according his vocabulary level. EnglishPal will determine a user's vocabulary level based on his picked words. After that, it will recommend articles for him to read, in order to booster his English vocabulary furthermore.

Run on your own laptop

python3 main.py

Make sure you have put the SQLite database file in the path app/static (see below).

Run it as a Docker container

Assuming that docker has been installed and that you are a sudo user (i.e., sudoer), start the program by typing the following command in directory EnglishPal:

sudo ./build.sh

Open your favourite Internet browser and enter this URL address: http://ip-address:90. Note: you must update the variable DEPLOYMENT_DIR in build.sh.

Explanation on the commands in build.sh

My steps for deploying English on a Ubuntu server.

• ssh to ubuntu@118...118

• cd to /home/lanhui/englishpal2/EnglishPal

• Stop all docker service: sudo service docker restart. If you know the docker container ID, then the above command is an overkill. Use the following command instead: sudo docker stop ContainerID. You could get all container IDs with the following command: sudo docker ps

• Rebuild container. Run the following command to rebuild a docker image each time after the source code gets updated: sudo docker build -t englishpal .

• Run the application: sudo docker run -d -p 90:80 -v /home/lanhui/englishpal2/EnglishPal/app/static/frequency:/app/static/frequency -t englishpal. If you use sudo docker run -d -p 90:80 -t englishpal, data will be lost after terminating the program. If you want to automatically restart the docker image after each system reboot, add the option --restart=always after docker run.

• Save disk space: sudo docker system prune -a -f

build.sh contains all the above commands. Run "sudo ./build.sh" to rebuild and start the web application.

Other useful docker commands

• sudo docker ps -a

• sudo docker logs image_name, where image_name could be obtained from sudo docker ps.

Importing articles

All articles are stored in the article table in a SQLite file called app/db/wordfreqapp.db.

Adding new articles

To add articles, open and edit app/db/wordfreqapp.db using DB Browser for SQLite (https://sqlitebrowser.org).

Extending an account's expiry date

By default, an account's expiry is 30 days after first sign-up. To extend account's expiry date, open and edit user table in app/db/wordfreqapp.db. Simply update field expiry_date.

Exporting the database

Export wordfreqapp.db to wordfreqapp.sql using the following commands:

• sqlite3 wordfreqapp.db

• .output wordfreqapp.sql

• .dump

• .exit

Put wordfreqapp.sql (not wordfreqapp.db) under version control.

Creating SQLite file from wordfreqapp.sql

Create wordfreqapp.db using this command: cat wordfreqapp.sql | sqlite3 wordfreqapp.db. Delete wordfreqapp.db first if it exists.

Uploading wordfreqapp.db to the server

pscp wordfreqapp.db lanhui@118.*.*.118:/home/lanhui/englishpal2/EnglishPal/app/db/

Feedback

We welcome feedback on EnglishPal. Feedback examples:

Feedback 1

• "Need a phone app. I use phone a lot. You cannot ask students to use computers."

Feedback 2

• “成为会员”改成“注册”

• “登出”改成“退出”

• “收集生词吧”改成“生词收集栏”

• 不要自动显示下一篇

• 需要有“上一篇”、“下一篇”按钮。

Bug tracking

EnglishPal's bugs and improvement suggestions are recorded in Bugzilla. Send (lanhui at zjnu.edu.cn) an email message for opening a Bugzilla account or reporting a bug.

End-to-end testing

We use the Selenium test framework to test our app.

In order to run the test, first we need to download a webdriver executable.

Microsoft Edge's webdriver can be downloaded from microsoft-edge-tools-webdriver. Make sure the version we download matches the version of the web browser installed on our laptop.

After extracting the downloaded zip file (e.g., edgedriver_win64.zip), rename msedgedriver.exe to MicrosoftWebDriver.exe.

Add MicrosoftWebDriver.exe's path to system's PATH variable.

Install the following dependencies too:

• pip install -U selenium==3.141.0
• pip install -U urllib3==1.26.2

Run English Pal first, then run the test using pytest as follows: pytest --html=pytest_report.html test_add_word.py

The above command will generate a HTML report file pytest_report.html after finishing executing test_add_word.py. Note: you need to install pytest-html package first: pip install pytest-html.

You may also want to use webdriver-manager from PyPI, so that you can avoid tediously installing a web driver executable manually. However, my experience shows that webdriver-manager is too slow. For example, it took me 16 minutes to run 9 tests, while with the pre-installed web driver executable, it took less than 2 minutes.

TODO

• Fix Bug: Internal server error when register using an email address.

• Usability testing

Improvements made by contributors (incomplete list)

朱文绮

在生词簿每个单词后面，加上两个按钮，熟悉与不熟悉:

• 如果点熟悉，就将生词簿中该单词后面记录的添加次数减一，直至减为0，就将该单词从生词簿中移除。

• 如果点不熟悉，就将生词簿中该单词后面记录的添加次数加一。

李康恬

Add the function of "Delete already known and well-known words from the words' library", on the one hand, it can conform to the usage habits of some users, who do not like that their words' libraries have too many words that they already know, on the other hand, it can reduce unnecessary memory occupied by the database, in addition, it can also improve the simplicity of the page.

占健豪

Click the Familiar or Unfamiliar button (current word frequency>1), the current word position is displayed at the top of the page;

Click the Familiar or Unfamiliar button (current word frequency is 1), and the page will be displayed as the top of the entire page.

Demo video link: https://b23.tv/QuB77m

张小飞

修复了以下漏洞。

漏洞：用 ‘ or ‘1’=‘1’ 这段字符可以作为任何账号的密码登录。

Bug report: http://118.25.96.118/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=215

丁锐

修复了以下漏洞

漏洞：新用户在创建账号时，不需要输入确定密码也可以注册成功，并且新账户可以正常使用。

Bug report: http://118.25.96.118/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=489

Last modified on 2023-01-30