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Buggy Racing
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Customising the Buggy Editor

This page is about customising the buggy editor repo — you should do this before sharing the URL with your students.

Before you start running the project, you need to prepare the buggy editor source code that your students will start with. The recommended way to do this depends on how you’re distributing the code:

  • If the students will download the source code from the race server (as a zipfile), you can customise it when you create the zip on the race server.

  • Otherwise you probably need to fork our “plain” buggy editor repo from github.com/buggyrace/buggy-race-editor and customise that (see below).

You don’t need to customise the buggy editor source code before sharing it with your students, but if you don’t it means the students’ apps won’t link helpfully back to your race server… which can be confusing.
We strongly recommend you customise the editor!

Customise the zipfile on the server

If you’re distributing the buggy editor to your students as a zipfile on the server, then customising the README is part of the process of publishing it. Once you’ve done that, you’re good to go. See publishing the zipfile for details.

Customise the repo manually

If you’re not publishing the zipfile on the race server, then you’ll need to customise the buggy editor repo manually. To do that, you first need a copy of it you can edit (and probably the simplest way is to fork it).

To fork the repo, log into your own GitHub account, then go to the buggy editor repo and click Fork (near the top right). You’ll get a (public) copy of the editor repo, which is the one you can edit. There are two files that you should change:

  • README.md
    The server can suggest a README for you which incorporates some of your config settings (specifically, your race server URL)
  • app.py
    The basic Python script includes constant BUGGY_RACE_SERVER_URL whose value should be the URL of your race server

The server can suggest your custom README

Admin → Config → Buggy Editor

The server can recommend a custom README by using the config settings you’ve made. The server’s buggy editor page provides an example README.md that you can copy, and use to replace the contents of the existing README.

Check that everything in that README is appropriate and helpful for your students — some things may depend a little on how and where your students will be running it.

The details in the README may need to change according to how you anticipate your students running their editor apps. For example, the default README directs students to find their running app at localhost:5000 at Flask’s default port 5000. But if you will be encouraging your students to run on pythonanywhere or repl.it that might be misleading.

The README suggestion text incorporates your config settings (including, crucially, BUGGY_RACE_SERVER_URL) so make sure those settings are up-to-date before copying it.

Fix the SERVER_URL in app.py

There’s a constant called BUGGY_RACE_SERVER_URL in app.py that is used as the target of links back to your race server. Change this line:

BUGGY_RACE_SERVER_URL = "https://RACE-SERVER-URL"

to contain the URL of your buggy race server.

Commit those changes

Remember to commit the changes!

Since these customisations are happening before your project has begun, there is a case for using git rebase to “flatten” the history so it only contains one commit (“Initial commit”). From the students’ point of view, the relationship between our repo and your customisations isn’t relevant detail.

Update the server VCS config

If you have forked (and customised) the editor repo, be sure to set the config to point at your fork of the repo, and not ours.

Admin → Config → Config:VCS

These are the config settings you should change/check:

  • BUGGY_EDITOR_GITHUB_URL
  • BUGGY_EDITOR_REPO_NAME
  • BUGGY_EDITOR_REPO_OWNER

Normally, the repo name and the repo owner should also occur within the URL.