Labtool

Labtool is a tool for grading programming projects at the Department of Computer Science, University of Helsinki.

Production in https://study.cs.helsinki.fi/labtool/

We have continued work which was started by the previous group (Software Engineering Project, TKT20007) during spring and early summer semesters, 2018. They rewrote the entire codebase of Labtool in Node.js and React. Previously Ruby on Rails was used.

Current documentation:

• Labtool's Wiki on GitHub

Running locally

Quickstart for local development:

• install docker and docker compose
• clone the repository
• build the docker images with docker compose build
• run docker compose up to start the application

End-to-end tests

Playwright tests covering the core student and teacher flows live in e2e/. They run against their own docker compose stack (docker-compose.e2e.yml), which uses separate ports and an ephemeral database, so it can run alongside the normal dev stack.

First time only:

cd e2e
npm install
npx playwright install chromium

Then, to run everything in one shot — starts the stack, runs the suite, tears the stack down:

npm run e2e

It exits non-zero if any test fails, and tears the stack down either way.

While developing tests it is faster to keep the stack running between runs:

npm run e2e:up      # start the stack on :3010 (frontend) and :3011 (backend)
npm test            # run the suite
npm run test:ui     # or step through it interactively
npm run e2e:down    # tear the stack down

The suite reseeds the database before every run, so it is safe to run repeatedly. Fixtures come from backend/server/seeders/20260916000000-e2e-fixtures.js, which only inserts anything when E2E_SEED=true and therefore leaves the dev stack untouched.