How to deploy a learn-ocaml instance

This section explains how to deploy an instance of the learn-ocaml platform on a server.

Using pre-built docker images

Assuming your exercise repository is in directory REPOSITORY, you can either:

  • build and serve it directly on port 80 (REPOSITORY needs to be an absolute path) using

    docker run --rm -v REPOSITORY:/repository:ro -v learn-ocaml-sync:/sync -p 80:8080 --name learn-ocaml-server ocamlsf/learn-ocaml:master

NB: Do not forget to escape : if it appears in REPOSITORY to avoid a parsing error of the command line arguments.

  • or generate a new docker image that includes your repository:
    cd REPOSITORY
wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ocaml-sf/learn-ocaml/master/Dockerfile.app
docker build -t learn-ocaml-app -f Dockerfile.app .

and then deploy that image:

  docker run --rm -p 80:8080 -v learn-ocaml-sync:/sync --name learn-ocaml-server learn-ocaml-app

The user data will persist between runs within the Docker "Volume" called learn-ocaml-sync. You can find out where it stores its data using:

  docker volume inspect learn-ocaml-sync -f '{{.Mountpoint}}'

This method can allow you to distribute the Docker image, which doesn't contain the exercise solutions in plaintext.

A remark about security

As a reminder, the Docker deamon's socket is owned by default by root. Hence, these scripts cannot work without sudo or adding your current user to the group docker. For more information, see post installation steps for Linux from the documentation. In any case, be advised there exists security flaws in the Docker daemon (see documentation).

Manual compilation

Note: you need a working opam environment (at least 2.0.0~rc2).

  • Install the dependencies using: opam switch create . --deps-only && opam install opam-installer && eval $(opam env)

  • Compile the learn-ocaml management tool using:

make && make opaminstall

  • Build the app for your given exercise repository. This will put it into a www/ directory: learn-ocaml build --repo DIR (depending on your opam configuration, you might need to run the command from the learn-ocaml directory or to specify the absolute path to the command: .../learn-ocaml/_opam/bin/learn-ocaml)

  • Run the learn-ocaml web server

learn-ocaml serve --port 8080