LRR (Lab Report Repository) is an online software application for course instructors to post, receive and mark assignments, and for students to submit assignments, or submit re-marking requests.
This software was originally developed by Mahomed Nor in 2018, a graduate student in the Department of Computer Science at the Zhejiang Normal University,
The LRR's project home page is at http://121.4.94.30/homepage/. For potential project contributors, we recommend that you browse its home page first to familiarize yourself with the project.
Our mission is to make the experience of submitting assignments great for tens of hundreds of students in the department of computer science at the Zhejiang Normal University.
LRR needs Apache and MySQL to run. I followed [How To Install Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP (LAMP) stack on Ubuntu 20.04](https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-install-linux-apache-mysql-php-lamp-stack-on-ubuntu-20-04) to set up these server applications. [How to install and configure PHP](https://ubuntu.com/server/docs/programming-php) is also a good guide.
LRR uses a database called `lrr`. So create this database using MySQL root account. Open MySQL's prompt using `sudo mysql`. Create the database using command `CREATE DATABASE lrr;`, and grant all privileges to MySQL user `lrr` using command `GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON lrr.* TO 'mnc'@'localhost' WITH GRANT OPTION;`. If MySQL user mnc does not exist, create it using command `CREATE USER 'mnc'@'localhost' IDENTIFIED BY 'password'`.
To facilitate data migration, I need to export the existing `lrr` to a plain text file (including many sql commands) and import that text file to the newly created `lrr` database on the new server.
The command for exporting the database is `mysqldump -u mnc -p lrr > lrr_database_dump.sql`, where mnc after -u is MySQL's username, and lrr after -p is the database name.
The command for importing is `mysql -u username -p lrr < lrr_database_dump.sql`. You must create database `lrr` first on your computer before doing the import. Read [How to Import and Export MySQL Databases in Linux](https://phoenixnap.com/kb/import-and-export-mysql-database) for more detail. Do not have lrr_database_dump.sql? You can use lrr_database.sql in this repo instead.
LRR also needs to store assignment submissions. We store them in a folder called `../../lrr_submission`. Note that `lrr_submission` is two levels above the project folder (where many PHP files reside). I copied this folder from the existing one. I think it is also OK if you create an empty folder.
`sudo chown -R www-data:www-data lrr_submission` and `sudo chmod -R g+rw lrr_submission`. Also, remember to change the user name and password in `lrr_submission/KeepItSafe.txt` for the database connection.
We need to correct these abnormal characters before we import them to the new database, so that the PHP program can correctly display Chinese information.
The simplest solution is using the ftfy (fixes text for you) Python package to convert them, as follows:
```
from ftfy import fix_text
with open('lrr_database_dump.sql') as f:
content = f.read()
content2 = fix_text(content)
with open('lrr_database_dump_sql_fixed.txt', 'w') as f:
f.write(content2)
```
Now, import data using lrr_database_dump_sql_*fixed*.txt.
If you encounter the 'Unknown MySQL server host' problem during import, replace all apostrophes with a space in the dump file. For example, if a database table field contains *can't*, then the apostrophe between *n* and *t* can cause that problem.
Enock, a graduate student here, has made a tutorial about how he deployed LRR to a remote server (http://lanlab.org/course/2021s/spm/PuTTY-Server.txt).
Most bugs are [recorded on Bugzilla](http://118.25.96.118/bugzilla/buglist.cgi?bug_status=__all__&list_id=1319&order=Importance&product=Lab%20Report%20Repository%20%28nor%20houzi%29&query_format=specific).
You can fork this project and start working on your fork. After you are done, please create a pull request so that we could review your changes and give you feedback.
We can also communicate through pull requests. You make a pull request, I review it and comment on it, and you revise your pull request until everyone is happy so that your changes get merged to the master branch.
