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cs102-F2020-challenge3-starter

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Due: Wednesday, December 9, 2020 by 3:00 pm

Objectives

The learning objectives for this challenge assignment are as follows:

  • To configure Git and GitHub on your laptop and on the GitHub servers
  • To transfer files from your laptop to your GitHub repository
  • To use a Docker container to run the automated checks performed by GatorGrader
  • To install the programs that you need to support the creation of a Python program
  • To use a terminal window to run a Python program and observe its output
  • To use your text editor and a terminal window to implement a Python program
  • To perform file input and output with a Python program
  • To count and display the lines in different types of text files

Introduction

Designed for use with GitHub Classroom and GatorGrader, this repository contains a challenge assignment for an introductory computer science class that uses the Python programming language. The source code and technical writing for this assignment must pass tests set by the GatorGrader tool. When you use the git commit and git push commands to transfer your source code to your GitHub repository, GitHub Actions will initialize a build of your assignment, checking to see if it meets all of the requirements. If both your source code and writing meet all of the established requirements, then you will see a green ✔ in the listing of commits in GitHub. If your submission does not meet the requirements, a red ❌ will appear instead. Please note that, at the option of the course instructor, some checks may be run in GitHub Actions that are not run locally by the GatorGrader tool.

Continuous Learning

If you have not done so already, please read all of the relevant GitHub Guides that explain how to use many of the features that GitHub provides. In particular, please make sure that you have read the following GitHub guides: Mastering Markdown, Hello World, and Documenting Your Projects on GitHub. Each of these guides will help you to understand how to use both GitHub and GitHub Classroom.

Students who want to learn more about how to use Docker should review the Docker Documentation. Students are also encouraged to review the documentation for their text editor, which is available in the VS Code docs. You should also review the Git documentation to learn more about how to use the Git command-line client. In addition to talking with the instructor and technical leader for your course, students are encouraged to search StackOverflow for answers to their technical questions.

As outlined in the course schedule in the course planning repository, students should also read all of the assigned readings for up to and including the week of the semester on which this challenge assignment was assigned.

Assignment Reminders

  • Follow each step carefully. Slowly read each sentence in this document, making sure that you precisely follow each instruction. Take notes about each step that you attempt, recording your questions and ideas and the challenges that you faced. If you are stuck, then please tell a technical leader or the course instructor what assignment step you recently completed.

  • Regularly ask and answer questions. Please log into Slack at the start of the challenge session and then join the appropriate channel. If you have a question about one of the steps in an assignment, then you can post it to the designated channel, discussing your questions through both Slack and the Google Meet designated for the class.

  • Store your files in GitHub. Starting with this challenge assignment, you will be responsible for storing all of your files (e.g., Python source code and Markdown-based writing) in a Git repository using GitHub Classroom. Please verify that you have saved your source code in your Git repository by using git status to ensure that everything is updated. You can see if your assignment submission meets the established correctness requirements by using the provided checking tools on your local computer and by checking the commits in GitHub.

  • Keep all of your files. Don't delete your programs, output files, and written reports after you submit them through GitHub; you will need them again when you study for the course assessments and work on the other challenge, practical, and technical challenge assignments.

  • Hone your technical writing skills. Computer science assignments require to you write technical documentation and descriptions of your experiences when completing each task. Take extra care to ensure that your writing is interesting and both grammatically and technically correct, remembering that computer scientists must effectively communicate and collaborate with their team members and the student technical leaders and course instructor.

  • Review the Honor Code on the syllabus. While you may discuss your assignments with others, copying source code or technical writing is a violation of Allegheny College's Honor Code.

Accessing the Assignment

To access this assignment, you should go into the #announcements channel in our Slack workspace and find the announcement that provides a link for it. Copy this link and paste it into your web browser. Now, you should accept the challenge assignment and see that GitHub Classroom created a new GitHub repository for you to access the assignment's starting materials and to store the completed version of your assignment. Specifically, to access your new GitHub repository for this assignment, please click the green "Accept" button and then click the link that is prefaced with the label "Your assignment has been created here". If you accepted the assignment and correctly followed these steps, you should have created a GitHub repository with a name like Allegheny-Computer-Science-102-Fall-2020/computer-science-102-fall-2020-challenge-3-gkapfham. Unless you provide the course instructor with documentation of the extenuating circumstances that you are facing, not accepting the assignment means that you automatically receive a failing grade for all of its components.

Before you move to the next step of this challenge assignment, please make sure that you read all of the content on the web site for your new GitHub repository, paying close attention to the technical details about the commands that you will type and the output that your program must produce. Now you are ready to download the starting materials to your challenge computer. Click the "Clone or download" button and, after ensuring that you have selected "Clone with SSH", please copy this command to your clipboard. To enter into your course directory directory you should now type cd cs102F2020. Next, you can type the either ls (on either MacOS or Linux) or dir (on Windows 10 Pro or Windows 10 Enterprise) and see that there are no files or directories inside of this directory. By typing git clone in your terminal and then pasting in the string that you copied from the GitHub site you will "download" all of the code for this assignment. For instance, if the course instructor ran the git clone command in the terminal, it would look like:

git clone [email protected]:Allegheny-Computer-Science-102-F2020/computer-science-102-fall-2020-challenge-3-gkapfham.git

After this command finishes, you can use cd to change into the new directory. If you want to "go back" one directory from your current location, then you can type the command cd ... Finally, please continue to use the cd and ls commands to explore the files that you automatically downloaded from GitHub. If one of the aforementioned commands does not work correctly, then it is possible that your terminal window is not up-to-date or not configured correctly. In this case, please share your specific error messages with the instructor, ultimately working to master the use of terminal commands. What files and directories do you see? What do you think is their purpose? Spend some time exploring, telling your discoveries to a student technical leader.

Challenge Assignment Tasks

Implementing a Python Program that Can Count Lines in an Input File

For this technical challenge you are invited to implement a Python program that can count the number of lines in the text file specified on the command line. As you study the provided source code, you should notice that there are TODO markers indicating that you need to add some source code statements before the program will work correctly. For instance, here is the output from respectively running the commands poetry run python linecounter --data-file inputs/career-data.txt and poetry run python linecounter --data-file inputs/computer-data.txt.

Welcome to the line counter program!

The data file inputs/career-data.txt contains 50000 lines of data in it!

Welcome to the line counter program!

The data file inputs/computer-data.txt contains 200 lines of data in it!

For this program you are invited to implement it in any suitable fashion as long as your program's source code adheres to all industry-standard best practices. To determine if your program adheres to certain basic standards, you should run the command poetry run pylint linecounter, fixing any issues that it raises. It is also a good idea for your to run the command poetry run flake8 linecounter to ensure that your program and test suite adheres to the guidelines enforced by the industry-standard flake8 linting tool. Finally, you can ensure that your program's source code has an industry-standard format by running the command poetry run black linecounter. Students who would like to do so are also invited to add a test suite to their program!

Reflecting on the Challenge Assignment

Once you have finished both of the previous technical tasks, use your text editor to answer all of the questions in the writing/reflection.md file. For instance, you should provide the output of the Python program in a fenced code block, making sure that you show how the program's output differs depending on the input file that you specify on the command line.

Transferring Your Source Code and Technical Writing to GitHub

As you are working on your challenge assignment, please make sure that you use VSCode or your terminal window to regularly save your work and transfer it to the GitHub servers. For instance, please use the git commit command in your terminal window or use the similar feature in VSCode to "stage" your changes in your repository. Once you have committed your source code to your repository, you can use the git push command to transfer your work to your GitHub repository, making it available for the course instructor to assess. Please make sure that you regularly commit your source code and technical writing, using descriptive commit messages to explain how each commit changes the contents of the repository. Please do not use vacuous commit messages that do not explain how your commit changes the contents of the repository!

Automated Checks with GatorGrader

In addition to meeting all of the requirements outlined in this assignment sheet, your submission must pass the following checks that GatorGrader automatically assesses:

If GatorGrader's automated checks pass correctly, the tool will produce the output like the following in addition to returning a zero exit code (which you can access by typing the command echo $?). You will need to run GatorGrader in a Docker container by following the steps in the Using Docker section.

  • The reflection.md in writing has exactly 2 of the heading tag
  • The reflection.md in writing has exactly 0 of the TODO fragment
  • The __main__.py in linecounter/linecounter has at least 2 multiple-line Python comment(s)
  • The reflection.md in writing has at least 4 of the code_block tag
  • The __main__.py in linecounter/linecounter has at least 4 single-line Python comment(s)
  • The reflection.md in writing has exactly 0 of the Add Your Name Here fragment
  • The __main__.py in linecounter/linecounter has exactly 0 of the TODO fragment
  • The repository has at least 5 commit(s)!
  • The file __main__.py exists in the linecounter/linecounter directory
  • The file reflection.md exists in the writing directory
  • The reflection.md in writing has at least 4 of the code tag
  • The command cd linecounter; poetry install;poetry run python linecounter --data-file inputs/career-data.txt; cd .. executes correctly
        ┏━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━┓
        ┃ Passed 12/12 (100%) of checks for cs102-F2020-challenge3! ┃
        ┗━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━┛

Assignment Assessment

Again taking inspiration from the principles of specification-based grading, the grade that a student receives on either a challenge assignment or a technical challenge will be based on whether or not it meets the standards for technical work in the fields of software engineering and discrete structures as evidenced by:

  • GitHub Actions Build Status of Either ✔ or ❌: Your work will receive a ✔ if the last before-the-deadline build in GitHub Actions passes and a ✔ appears in the GitHub commit log instead of an ❌. The build status reported by GitHub Actions will only be a ✔ if the Python source code and technical writing in the GitHub repository pass all of both the GatorGrader checks and any additional checks.

Advance Feedback on an Assignment

Students who wish to receive feedback on their work for any course assignment should first open an issue on the issue tracker for their assignment's GitHub repository, giving an appropriate title and description for the type of feedback that you would like the course instructor to provide. After creating this issue, you will see that GitHub has created a unique web site that references it. To alert the course instructor to the fact that the issue was created and that you want feedback on your work, please send it to him by a Slack direct message at least 24 hours in advance of the project's due date. After the instructor responds to the issue, please resolve all of the stated concerns and participate in the discussion until the issue is resolved and ultimately marked as closed.

Discussion of a Graded Assignment

Students who wish to receive feedback on their work for any graded course assignment should leave question in the same region of Github where the course instructor submitted the assignment's grade. For example, if the instructor submits your grade to a pull request in your repository for a challenge assignment, then you should ask questions about your grade in that pull request, bearing in mind the need to @-mention the course instructor in the body of your comment. Students can continue to discuss the graded assignment with the course instructor until they understand all the technical topics that were the focus of the particular assignment.

Additional System Resources

System Commands

This project invites students to enter system commands into a terminal window. This assignment uses Docker to deliver programs, such as gradle and the source code and packages needed to run GatorGrader, to a students' computer, thereby eliminating the need for a programmer to install them on their development workstation. Individuals who do not want to install Docker can optionally install of the programs mentioned in the Project Requirements section of this document.

Non-Interactive Docker Commands

Once you have installed Docker Desktop, with MacOS and Linux you can use the following docker run command to start gradle grade as a containerized application, using the DockaGator Docker image available on DockerHub.

docker run --rm --name dockagator \
  -v "$(pwd)":/project \
  -v "$HOME/.dockagator":/root/.local/share \
  gatoreducator/dockagator

The aforementioned command will use "$(pwd)" (i.e., the current working directory) as the project directory and "$HOME/.dockagator" as the cached GatorGrader directory. Please note that both of these directories must exist, although only the project directory must contain something. Generally, the project directory should contain the source code and technical writing for an assignment, as provided to a student by the instructor through GitHub. Additionally, the cached directory should not contain anything other than directories and programs created by DockaGator, thus ensuring that they are not otherwise overwritten during the completion of the assignment.

To ensure that the previous command will work correctly, you should create the cache directory by running the command mkdir $HOME/.dockagator on the MacOS and Linux operating systems. However, if you are using the Windows operating system then you will instead need to type the command mkdir %HomeDrive%%HomePath%/.dockagator. Finally, since the above docker run command does not work correctly on the Windows operating system, you will need to instead run the following command to adapt to the differences in the cmd terminal window:

docker run --rm --name dockagator \
  -v "%cd%:/project" \
  -v "%HomeDrive%%HomePath%/.dockagator:/root/.local/share" \
  gatoreducator/dockagator

Please note that not all version of the Windows terminal window will correctly recognize the use of the %cd% and %HomeDrive%%HomePath% variables. In this case, you should substitute the actual directory for a specific course assignment for the %cd% variable and the drive letter that contains the .dockagator directory for the %HomeDrive%%HomePath% variable. Finally, the Windows terminal window may not work correctly when you attempt to run a multi-line command. In this case, you should break up the aforementioned four-line command into separate lines, like docker run --rm --name dockagator and -v "%cd%:/project" and then connect them into a single long line that you separate by a single space. Here is an example of what the long command would look like, again assuming that the Windows cmd terminal correctly interprets the %cd% and %HomeDrive%%HomePath% variables:

docker run -it --rm --name dockagator -v "%cd%:/project" -v "%HomeDrive%%HomePath%/.dockagator:/root/.local/share" gatoreducator/dockagator /bin/bash

Here are some additional commands that you may need to run when using Docker:

  • docker info: display information about how Docker runs on your workstation
  • docker images: show the Docker images installed on your workstation
  • docker container list: list the active images running on your workstation
  • docker system prune: remove many types of "dangling" components from your workstation
  • docker image prune: remove all "dangling" docker images from your workstation
  • docker container prune: remove all stopped docker containers from your workstation
  • docker rmi $(docker images -q) --force: remove all docker images from your workstation

Commands for an Interactive Docker Shell

Since the above docker run command uses a Docker images that, by default, runs gradle grade and then exits the Docker container, you may want to instead run the following command so that you enter an "interactive terminal" that will allow you to repeatedly run commands within the Docker container. Don't forget that, if you are using the Windows operating system, then you will need to use a different command to run Docker, as explained previously in this document. Importantly, the command that you type if you are a Windows user should still contain the -it at the start of the docker run and the /bin/bash at the end of the command. However, the other components of this command need to be customized for the Windows operating system.

If you use either MacOS or Linux, then this is the command that you would run to enter into the interactive terminal provided by a Docker container:

docker run -it --rm --name dockagator \
  -v "$(pwd)":/project \
  -v "$HOME/.dockagator":/root/.local/share \
  gatoreducator/dockagator /bin/bash

If you use Windows, then this is the command that you would run to enter into the interactive terminal provided by a Docker container:

docker run -t --rm --name dockagator \
  -v "%cd%:/project" \
  -v "%HomeDrive%%HomePath%/.dockagator:/root/.local/share" \
  gatoreducator/dockagator /bin/bash

Once you have typed this command, you can use the GatorGrader tool in the Docker container by typing the command gradle grade in your terminal. Running this command will produce a lot of output that you should carefully inspect. If GatorGrader's output shows that there are no mistakes in a course assignment, then your source code and technical writing are passing all of the automated baseline checks. However, if the output indicates that there are mistakes, then you will need to understand what they are and then try to fix them.

Remember, to correctly run any of the commands mentioned in this guide, you must be in the main (i.e., "home base") directory for a course assignment where the build.gradle file is located.

Upgrading the Docker Container

If the course instructor provides a new version of the Docker container called gatoreducator/dockagator and you want to receive it immediately, you must first delete the existing Docker container on your laptop by running the command docker rmi gatoreducator/dockagator. Next, you can re-run one of the aforementioned Docker commands, like the following one, which would work on MacOS or Linux:

docker run -it --rm --name dockagator \
  -v "$(pwd)":/project \
  -v "$HOME/.dockagator":/root/.local/share \
  gatoreducator/dockagator /bin/bash

Please note that if you attempt to run gradle grade in an updated Docker container it is possible that the command will execute incorrectly if you previously used GatorGrader with a Docker container that featured a different version of the Python programming language. In this situation, you should delete the directories inside of the .dockagator directory and then again attempt to run the gradle grade command inside of the Docker container. Specifically, you will need to delete directories in .dockagator that are normally called gatorgrader, virtualenv, and virtualenvs.

Downloading Project Updates

If GatorGrader's maintainers push updates to this sample assignment and you received it through GitHub Classroom and you would like to also receive these updates, then you can type this command in the main directory for this assignment:

git remote add download [email protected]:Allegheny-Computer-Science-102-F2020/cs102-F2020-challenge3-starter.git

You should only need to type this command once; running the command additional times may yield an error message but will not negatively influence the state of your Git repository. Now, you are ready to download the updates provided by the GatorGrader maintainers by typing this command:

git pull download master

This second command can be run whenever the maintainers needs to provide you with new source code for this assignment. However, please note that, if you have edited the files that we updated, running the previous command may lead to Git merge conflicts. If this happens, you may need to manually resolve them with the help of the instructor or a student technical leader. Finally, please note that the Gradle plugin for GatorGrader will automatically download the newest version of GatorGrader.

Using GitHub Actions

This assignment uses GitHub Actions to automatically run GatorGrader and additional checking programs every time you commit to your GitHub repository. The checking will start as soon as you have accepted the assignment — thus creating your own private repository — and the course instructor and/or GitHub enables GitHub Actions on it. If you do not see either a yellow ● or a green ✔ or a red ❌ in your listing of commits, then please ask the instructor to see whether or not GitHub Actions was correctly enabled.

System Requirements

This assignment was developed to work with the following software and versions:

  • Docker Desktop
  • Operating Systems
    • Linux
    • MacOS
    • Windows 10 Pro
    • Windows 10 Enterprise
  • Programming Language Tools
    • Gradle 6.6
    • MDL 0.5.0
    • Python 3.7 or 3.8

Reporting Problems

If you have found a problem with this assignment's provided source code or documentation, then you can go to the Computer Science 102 Fall 2020 Planning Repository and raise an issue. If you have found a problem with the GatorGrader tool and the way that it checks your assignment, then you can also raise an issue in that repository. To ensure that your issue is properly resolved, please provide as many details as is possible about the problem that you experienced. Individuals who find, and use the appropriate GitHub issue tracker to correctly document, a mistake in any aspect of this assignment will receive extra credit towards their grade for the course.

Receiving Assistance

If you are having trouble completing any part of this project, then please talk with either the course instructor or a student technical leader during the course session. Alternatively, you may ask questions in the Slack workspace for this course. Finally, you can schedule a meeting during the course instructor's office hours.

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Starter for Challenge Assignment 3 in Computer Science 102 Fall 2020

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