Professor

Professor is Hack4Impact-UMD's technical assessment autograder. It runs Playwright tests against assessment submissions and reports results to Firestore (when run as a grading worker) or the terminal (when run locally).

Professor is integrated as a grading worker for the Hack4Impact-UMD Application Portal.

CLI Usage

professor grade <assessment_repo_path> <test_repo_path>

Runs Playwright tests against a submission locally and prints results to the terminal.

professor serve [--port|-p <port>]

Starts the HTTP grading server. Port defaults to $PORT or 8000. Requires Firebase credentials.

Architecture

graph TB
    User[Applicant] -->|Submits Assessment| Frontend[App Portal - Frontend]
    Frontend[App Portal - Frontend] -->|Reads Status and Results| User[Applicant]
    Frontend -->|Requests Grading| Backend[App Portal - Backend]

    Backend -->|Creates Documents| Firestore[(Firestore)]
    Backend -->|Enqueues Job| CloudTasks[Queue - Cloud Tasks]

    CloudTasks -->|Delivers Job| Professor[Professor - Cloud Run]

    Professor -->|Updates Documents| Firestore
    Professor -->|Clones Repo| GitHub[GitHub]
    Professor -->|Tests Repo| Playwright[Playwright]

    Firestore -->|Reads Documents| Frontend

    style Frontend fill:#4285f4,color:#fff
    style Backend fill:#4285f4,color:#fff
    style Professor fill:#9334e9,color:#fff
    style Firestore fill:#ffa000,color:#fff
    style CloudTasks fill:#34a853,color:#fff

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Tech Stack

• Language: Go
• Runtime: Node
• Package Manager: pnpm
• Testing: Playwright
• Database: Firestore
• Deployment: Docker, Google Cloud Run

Local Development

Build locally with:

make build

The resulting binary will be professor.

With Docker installed and alive, build the image with:

make docker-build

Then run with:

make docker-run

Make sure you have a .env file in the root directory with PROJECT_ID set correctly, and DEV=true in order to connect to the firestore emulator

And now http://localhost:8000 on your machine should be live!