Pulsar Academy 🚀⭐

Pulsar Academy was an online code-teaching company that operated from 2020-2021. My friend Maxwell Zhang and I founded it during the COVID-19 pandemic in order to help students learn the fundamentals of coding and competitive programming.

This website was made to streamline our project, as it handled the registration and payment process, class notes, and lecture videos (lessons were taught over call). It was also a good way to help me learn web development, as I was getting more familiar with Django and HTML/CSS/JS.

Now that I am in university, Pulsar Academy is no longer active, but this website remains a landmark to my progress with web development. I hope we were able to help our students find the joy in coding.

Features 🛎😎

• User Registration and Login
• Course registration, customizable profile, and password reset
  • Security via email confirmation via SendGrid SMTP Server
• Course payment via Paypal integration
• Customizable class with course schedule, lesson content via Markdown and WYSIWYG editors, embedded video, homework + solutions
• Rich course forum for students to communicate with one another
• Rich Staff and Admin Panel directly on the website
  • Permissions to add content, upload files, create courses, manage students, etc.
  • Edit all info with WYSIWYG editors. Easy to use, no coding needed

Admin Page

Admin page to control class content. Can only be seen by authenticated staff or administrators.

Admin console for seeing course logistics, registrations, and emails for email lists.

Course Pages

What students see for a class they have registered and paid for. They can easily see the lessons as well as lesson content and the recorded lectures.

What students see when clicking on a lesson. They can access lecture notes, homework details, and the course video, which was live but also recorded.

Students don't have to be afraid of asking for help. They can access a forum for each course to ask the instructors or other students questions about homework or class content.

Example of the editor studenst see when editing their forum posts. The time is automatically updated when they save.

Setup 🧑‍🍳

The whole project is containerized with Docker to streamline setup and execution.

1. You should download docker and docker-compose. Learn how to do that here: https://docs.docker.com/get-docker/.

2. Next, you should clone the repo using git clone https://[email protected]/belowocean/pythoncamp.git.

Local Deployment 💻

You can run the website locally using the docker-compose.yml file. The whole project will be set up after the images are downloaded and built.

$ docker-compose up -d --build

You need to migrate to the database before things will work:

$ docker-compose exec web python manage.py makemigrations
$ docker-compose exec web python manage.py migrate

Check localhost:8000or 127.0.0.1:8000 on your browser to check if it is working.

Production Deployment

You will need to shift over to the docker-compose-prod.yml or docker-compose-test.yml configuration file. This file uses more containers to be able to run the application.

No HTTPS

Follows very similarly to above. First, you have to modify the NGINX configuration file located in /config/nginx/local.conf/conf.d and comment out the listener on port 443. You also need to comment out the line that does automatic HTTPS forwarding and remove any reference to SSL within the listener on port 80. The configuration file should look something like this:

upstream my_server {
    server web:80;
}
server {
    listen 80;
    server_name pulsaracademy.com;

    location / {
        proxy_pass http://my_server;
        proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-For $proxy_add_x_forwarded_for;
        proxy_set_header Host $Host;
        proxy_redirect off;
    }
    location /static/ {
        alias /code/staticfiles/;
        expires -1;
    }
}

This file is not included in the repo so you can just copy-paste it and replace the current conf.d file.

Next, you need to build the container and migrate to the database:

$ docker-compose -f docker-compose-test.yml up -d --build
$ docker-compose exec web python manage.py makemigrations
$ docker-compose exec web python manage.py migrate

Done!

Yes HTTPS

Before building, you need to setup SSL certificates. I will assume the use of Let's Encrypt for SSL certification. This section assumes that you have a domain pointing to the IP or domain-name of whatever server you're using, otherwise it won't really work. For example, I had http://pulsaracademy.com pointing to 12.232.194 (example) before I ran the script described below.

A good guide you can follow is this article by Medium user philipp, but I'll simplify it down here.

The setup requires the SSL certificates to exist prior to building the container, so we will use a script to generate some dummy scripts first, which will eventually be replaced by real certificates. First, we should download the script and make it executable:

$ curl -L https://raw.githubusercontent.com/wmnnd/nginx-certbot/master/init-letsencrypt.sh > init-letsencrypt.sh
$ chmod +x init-letsencrypt.sh

First, you will need to change some fields in the file. You should enter the domains, name, and email into the appropriate fields in the file. Second, you will need to modify some commands in the script. All the docker-compose commands should be followed by -f docker-compose-prod.yml, otherwise the containers will fail. Another way to combat this is by renaming docker-compose-prod.yml to docker-compose.yml. Whichever one is better for you.

They should be in the first few lines of the script. Now, to run the script:

$ sudo ./init-letsencrypt.sh

# If that doesn't work, try this:
$ sudo bash init-letsencrypt.sh

If the process fails, maybe try building the docker-compose first, knowing it will fail. Or maybe try the non-HTTPS config first and come back.

Assuming it worked, we can take down the containers and put them back up for self-assurance.

$ docker-compose -f docker-compose-prod.yml down
$ docker-compose -f docker-compose-prod.yml up -d
$ docker-compose exec web python manage.py makemigrations
$ docker-compose exec web python manage.py migrate

Enjoy!

A Note

Remember all the content on the website is technically copyrighted. This setup is just for you to see how it works or to help influence your own projects. Good luck!

Django Dependencies:

• allauth: OAuth authentication + User management engine.
• crispy_forms: Bootstrap CSS friendly form generation and templating.
• paypal.standard.ipn: PayPal integration. Collects the return signal after successful payments.
• django_feather: Open source icon pack used throughout the website. Website.
• django_crontab: Module for running Python cronjobs.
• tinymce: WYSIWYG editor for forums, class content, and general text editing.
• psycopg2-binary: PostgreSQL engine for Python projects.
• django-paypal: PayPal form integration.
• gunicorn: WSGI HTTP server for production.

Technologies Employed

• Django
  • Python
• Docker
  • docker-compose
  • App containerization
  • SSL certbot containerization
  • Database containerzation
• NGINX
• PostgreSQL
• HTML/CSS/JS
  • PopperJS Positioning Library
  • Bootstrap4 CSS + JS
  • Animate on Scroll Library
  • Toastr.js Notifications
  • Prism.js Code Syntax Highlighting
  • JQuery + AJAX