Installation and hosting
To run the project, you need to be running the race server that provides the web site that is both the main source of information for students and staff, and also accepts the JSON data that is the output of the applications the students are developing (their “buggy editors”).
There are basically two ways to host this — either self-host (on your own or your institution’s infrastructure, or on a third-party hosting provider), or in the cloud, using Heroku.
The students do not do their programming work on the race server — that happens on their own machines (or in the cloud): see Where to run the app?.