Meteor app for coordinating solving for our MIT Mystery Hunt team. Codex-blackboard was developed for use by medium to large teams (50+ solvers). It is particularly suited to teams that have many drop-ins, accept unattached solvers, and/or have privacy-conscious members, since access is given by a shared password, and not membership in a Google Group or Discord server.
See the wiki for instructions on:
- Building and managing a server. Note that there are significant changes for 2025!
- Using the server as a solver
- Updating data on the server as an on-call
To run in development mode:
cd codex-blackboard
meteor
<browse to localhost:3000>
If you have application default credentials configured (e.g. you're running on
Compute Engine, you manually configured the environment variable, or you used
gcloud auth application-default login to log in as yourself), it will use
Drive as that account. If you want the documents and folders it creates to be
shared with some other account, set the DRIVE_OWNER_ADDRESS environment
variable, or driveowner in the meteor settings json file. (i.e. make a json
file with that key, then pass the filename to meteor with the --settings flag.)
Your code is pushed live to the server as you make changes, so
you can just leave meteor running. You can reset the internal database with:
meteor reset
meteor --settings private/settings.json
but note that this won't delete any Google Drive files.
If you're running under Windows Subsystem for Linux, and you want to use your Windows partition for the git repository (e.g. so you can use the native GitHub client and/or graphical editors) you will need to mount a directory on the virtual Linux filesystem as .meteor/local. You will also need to store your settings.json file on the virtual Linux filesystem.
Our blackboard app currently requires Meteor 3.0.3.
At the moment the two ways to install Meteor are:
- just make a git clone of the meteor repository and put it in $PATH, or
- use the package downloaded by their install shell script
The latter option is easier, and automatically downloads the correct
version of meteor and all its dependencies, based on the contents of
codex-blackboard/.meteor/release. Simply cross your fingers, trust
in the meteor devs, and do:
curl https://install.meteor.com | /bin/sh
You can read the script and manually install meteor this way as well;
it just involves downloading a binary distribution and installing it
in ~/.meteor.
If piping stuff from the internet directly to /bin/sh gives you the
willies, then you can also run from a git checkout. Something like:
cd ~/3rdParty
git clone git://github.com/meteor/meteor.git
cd meteor
git checkout release/[email protected]
cd ~/bin ; ln -s ~/3rdParty/meteor/meteor .
Meteor can run directly from its checkout, and figure out where to
find the rest of its files itself --- but it only follows a single symlink
to its binary; a symlink can't point to another symlink. If you use a
git checkout, you will be responsible for updating your checkout to
the latest version of meteor when codex-blackboard/.meteor/release
changes.
You should probably watch the screencast at http://meteor.com to get a sense of the framework; you might also want to check out the examples they've posted, too.