Courpass

Easily visualize UVic course prerequisites.

Please note that this project is no longer operational in its current state, as the underlying UVic webpages it relied on have since been deprecated.

Prerequisites

You will need a Python environment with the packages as specified in the requirements.txt file installed. Creating a venv to manage this environment is recommended, but not necessary.

Run

Django webserver

To launch the Django server for local development, navigate to the academic_calendar_scraper/academic_calendar_scraper directory. From there, you can run the following command:

$ python3 manage.py runserver

The above command will output some status information. You will likely see a message regarding "18 unapplied migration(s)," as mentioned in the docs here; they can be ignored at this time.

You will find the server running here; note, the local development url is also given as part of the above command's output.

Command-line usage

Within the root directory, there is a main.py file which can be used to generate a text-based prerequisite grid. Basic usage is as follows:

$ python3 -O main.py <LIST_OF_COURSES_TO_SEARCH> <LIST_OF_PREREQS_TO_FIND>

where LIST_OF_COURSES_TO_SEARCH and LIST_OF_PREREQS_TO_FIND are comma-separated lists. For example:

$ python3 -O main.py CSC360,CSC361,CSC370,CSC421,MATH100,MATH346 CSC226,SENG265,CSC230,ECE255,MATH120,MATH204,MATH200
Prereq of: CSC360*   CSC361*   CSC370*   CSC421⁴  MATH100*+  MATH346* 
    CSC226    ✗         C         ✗         ✓         ✗         ✗     
   SENG265    ✓         ✓         ✓         ✗         ✗         ✗     
    CSC230    ✓¹        ✓²        ✗         ✗         ✗         ✗     
    ECE255    ✓¹        ✓²        ✗         ✗         ✗         ✗     
   MATH120    ✗         ✗         ✗         ✗        ✓³¹        ✗     
   MATH204    ✗         ✗         ✗         ✗         ✗        ✓⁴²    
   MATH200    ✗         ✗         ✗         ✗         ✗        ✓⁴¹    
-----------
Header legend:
     ²³⁴⁵: Minimum year standing required.
        *: Not all prereqs shown. See calendar for details.
        +: Or department permission.
-----------
Grid legend:
 ✓: Prerequsite, C: Corequisite, ✗: Not a co/prequisite
        1: Any 1 of these. Not all options in this group shown. See calendar for details.
        2: Any 1 of these. Not all options in this group shown. See calendar for details.
        3: Any 1 of these. Not all options in this group shown. See calendar for details.
              3 1: All of these. Minimum grade of C+ required.
        4: Any 1 of these.
              4 1: All of these. Not all options in this group shown. See calendar for details.
              4 2: All of these.

To enable debugging output, remove the -O argument from the launch command.

Deploy

Deployment largely follows the standard Django deployment steps, which will vary depending on your exact setup. We deployed the courpass.ca website using apache2 with mod_wsgi on an Ubuntu 22.04 server.

A good guide that discusses hosting Django using apache2 and mod_wsgi is available here. When configuring your server, note that academic_calendar_scraper/ is the root of the Django directory in this repo.

Note that since we use the Font Awesome Free icons, you will need to make sure to serve these icons in your deployment. In our case, we needed to add the following line to our apache2 site configuration:

Alias /courpass/static/fontawesomefree "/var/www/courpass-venv/lib/python3.10/site-packages/fontawesomefree/static/fontawesomefree"

Again, this step may vary depending on your exact setup.