Trips Application Grader

A small webapp that pull applications from a google sheet and gives people the ability to grade them.

Development

• npm run dev - Run the app in development mode
• npm run start - Run the app in production mode
• npm run format - Lint and format code
• npm run generate-env-vars - Generate environment variables from the app-config
• npm run init-db - Create the database and download applications into it

Config format

To run the app, create a JSON config file with the following information.

"sheetId": "10Uz3WgMkLQRo9jBCwYykpUjTQiODJZbViia7gjwnl4o",
"progressColumn": "E",
"identifierColumn": "CT",
"questions": [
    {
        "column": "AN",
        "prompt": "Reflect on your own transition to Dartmouth."
    },
    {
        "column": "AO",
        "prompt": "Elaborate on one or two major aspects of yourself (experiences, identities, perspectives, background, etc.) that affect your approach to being a Trips volunteer."
    }
],
"graders": []

This allows the app to map a question to the appropriate column, even if the form entry doesn't create the exact column headers we want in row #1.

To load this config file into the application, it needs to be compressed into a one-line environment variable. A helper script, scripts/generate-env-vars.js, can do this for you: if the config file has been saved as app-config.json in the /configs directory, the script will create a .env file in the home directory with the config in it.

The spreadsheet needs to have a "responses" sheet, and a "grades" sheet, where "responses" has all the application responses, and "grades" is used by the webapp to save grades.

Database

The first time you run the app, you'll need to load the applications into the database. The script for this is in the scripts directory and can be run with node scripts/apps-loader.js [OFFSET NUM], where [OFFSET NUM] is the number of rows at the beginning of the sheet to exclude (headers and such). Running that command requires that the GOOGLE_SERVICE_KEY and GOOGLE_SERVICE_PRIVATE_KEY env vars be in the current shell session.

Deployment

This year I used fly.io to deploy the service. If you'd rather deploy it elsewhere, go for it. However, this is basically what you have to do:

fly launch
fly volume create data -r bos -n 1
fly deploy
npm run fly-secrets
npm run fly-deploy