ARSnova is a modern approach to Audience Response Systems (ARS). It is released under the GPLv3 license, and is offered as a Software as a Service free of charge. Head over to arsnova.eu to see it in action.
ARSnova consists of two projects: the mobile frontend and the backend. This repository contains the backend code. You will find the frontend at thm-projects/arsnova-mobile. However, you do not need to download both repositories in order to get started.
The most convenient way to get started developing ARSnova is by using our Vagrant environment, found at thm-projects/arsnova-vagrant. Use your IDE on your host machine to make changes to ARSnova, while the build process is completely handled by the Vagrant box. You will not need to install any development tools.
arsnova-vagrant sets up a
virtual machine for both development and production use. The basic usage is
vagrant up, which will start the development environment. If you wish to start
production as well, use vagrant up production.
Once any machine has been started, all required ARSnova repositories are automatically cloned from GitHub, so that you can start coding immediately.
To connect to your development machine, type vagrant ssh. After that, you can
start ARSnova inside the machine by running ./start.sh. You can then access
ARSnova from your host machine by opening http://localhost:8080.
arsnova-vagrant also sets up the build environment we use internally at THM, which consists of Jenkins and SonarQube. The former provides a QA pipeline that builds, tests, analyzes, and finally deploys ARSnova to the production environment. SonarQube is used for the analyzation phase and provides a drill-down into many quality aspects, including technical debt.
While the development environment is running, Jenkins and SonarQube are available at:
- http://localhost:9000 (SonarQube)
- http://localhost:9090 (Jenkins)
We also leverage the cloud provided by Travis CI and Sauce Labs to build and test ARSnova. Travis first builds and unit tests the software, then it instructs Sauce Labs to run smoke tests on different browsers and operating systems. This ensures that the basic features of ARSnova work across browsers and platforms. See this example to get an idea.
Our official build status provided by Travis CI:
for ARSnova Backend
for ARSnova Mobile
This is ARSnova's main repository. Almost all dependencies are managed for you by Maven.
If you have no intention in contributing, you might want to consider downloading one of our pre-built WAR archives. You will find them in our Maven repository, but please do note that we are not officially offering these archives.
ARSnova consists of two main projects: ARSnova Backend (this repository) and ARSnova Mobile.
Because all dependencies are handled by Maven, a complete build is done with:
mvn install
Note: Java 1.7 JDK is required and must be installed prior to building ARSnova.
You need three things to get started developing ARSnova:
- the configuration file,
- a CouchDB database including several view documents,
- and a development server.
We will cover all three in the following sections.
You will need to do some configuration work upfront: add a new directory
"arsnova" in /etc, and create a copy of
arsnova.properties.example named
arsnova.properties in this directory. Then change the settings to match your
environment, e.g. you might want to change the URLs.
Also, don't forget to change all properties starting with couchdb, if you do
not want to use our defaults. The properties are used in the next section.
A note to Windows users: our settings are based on Linux and Mac environments. We do not officially support Windows, so you have to do some extra steps. The property file's path is hard coded in spring-main.xml and in the "Setup Tool" (see next section). You want to change the paths to make them match your environment.
We provide a Python script that will set up all database essentials. This "Setup
Tool" is located at
thm-projects/arsnova-setuptool.
Make sure you have configured your database credentials inside the ARSnova
configuration file (see previous section): you will need to have the entries
couchdb.username and couchdb.password.
To set up the database, run:
python tool.py
This will create the database along with all required view documents. Note that this script requires Python 2 and will not run with Python 3.
The easiest way to deploy ARSnova is via Jetty:
mvn jetty:run -Dmobile.path=
This will work out of the box. ARSnova will be located at http://localhost:8080/.
If you're wondering what that -Dmobile.path= thing is doing, this is a special
override property for Jetty. By default, this property points to a local version
of ARSnova mobile located at ../arsnova-mobile — relative to the
location of this project. If you happen to have downloaded ARSnova mobile to
this location, you may skip the override, and just use:
mvn jetty:run
If you intend to use ARSnova in productive environments, you will have to do some additional configuration work.
In order to build up a full featured server installation containing ARSnova and CouchDB you have to install at least the following services:
- Apache Tomcat 7.0.29 (or newer)
- Apache Webserver 2.2 or newer with builtin modules
mod_proxy,mod_proxy_ajpandmod_proxy_http - Apache CouchDB
Make sure all services are installed. Next step is to configure the Apache Webserver. Find the configuration file or create a new one for use with a virtual host. This depends on your needs. At least you should have a configuration containing these settings:
<Location />
ProxyPass ajp://127.0.0.1:8009/
ProxyPassReverse ajp://127.0.0.1:8009/
</Location>
All requests will be sent to your Apache Tomcat servlet container, using AJP running on port 8009.
To enable the required Apache Webserver modules simply type:
# a2enmod proxy
# a2enmod proxy_ajp
# a2enmod proxy_http
The configuration is ready for development usage. Finally, you should (re)start all services. ARSnova is now listening on HTTP port 80.
Look for your Tomcat configuration directory and change the file "context.xml" to match this example:
<Context>
<Manager pathname="/path/to/tomcat/sessions/arsnova.ser"/>
</Context>
This will enable session persistence across restarts as described here.
To protect requests and responses you should use HTTPS and configure your Apache Webserver installation to redirect all traffic according to this example.
Finally you should (re)start all services. ARSnova is now listening on HTTP port 80 and 443.
To provide SSL websocket encryption, you have to provide the servers SSL key and certificate in a Java keystore. The following steps will guide you through this process.
Use your webserver certificate, private key and certificate chain to create a PKCS12 keystore:
openssl pkcs12 -export -in <servercert>.crt \
-inkey <serverkey>.key \
-out keystore.p12 -name 1 \
-certfile <your_cert_chain_file>
You will be asked for a password for your PKCS12 keystore. This password must be used for importing this keystore into your java keystore. The import can be done using this command:
keytool -importkeystore \
-deststorepass <your_java_keystore_password> \
-destkeypass <your_java_keystore_password> \
-destkeystore arsnova.jks \
-srckeystore keystore.p12 \
-srcstoretype PKCS12 \
-srcstorepass <your_pkcs12_keystore_password> \
-alias 1
Be sure to provide the correct certificate and key file names and to use the correct passwords for your keystore.
The last step is to find your ARSnova configuration file (see step "Configuration" above), setup the location of your Java keystore and its password.
security.ssl=true
security.keystore=<your keystore location>
security.storepass=<your keystore password>
ARSnova is powered by Technische Hochschule Mittelhessen - University of Applied Sciences.