Project Background

BadgeKit will make it simple to get started with badgin and provide lightweight, modular and open options for the community of badgemakers. We are framing BadgeKit around a set of action verbs. Each verb represents an invitation to innovation around defining and refining the user experience for the particular action that the user is attempting to do. Here are the verbs: Build, Assess, Issue, Collect, Share, Discover and Use.

BadgeKit evolved out of several years of work in this field as well as LOTS of user testing and research. Our initial goal will be to develop proofs of concept for experiences for each of the actions. In order to develop a vision for this work, we looked at the work that we have been doing for the Chicago Summer of Learning, the Connected Educators Month and for the Mozilla Summit. Each project helped us to produce some great open source solutions for distinct badging experience ranging in size from one badge to thousands of badges being issued. With each project, we user tested, got feedback and iterated - so just think of BadgeKit as our next big iteration on our offering.

Setup

App Configuration

BadgeKit can be configured using three different methods (in order of priority):

• command line arguments
• a JSON configuration file
• environment variables

These can be accessed within the app like so:

var config = require('./lib/config');

var port = config('PORT', 3000);
var cookie_secret = config('COOKIE_SECRET');

If a default value is given, it will be returned if not found elsewhere in the configuration. If it is not given, and no value is found, a ReferenceError will be thrown.

Command line arguments

Pass these in when starting the app, like so:

> node app --port 3456 --cookieSecret chocolatechips

JSON configuration

If the app finds a config.json file in the root, it will use parameters in this file where possible.

{
  "port": 3456,
  "cookie": {
    "secret": "chocolatechips"
  }
}

Environment variables

Finally, configuration will be picked up from the environment. This is most easily done by writing a config.env file (or similar):

export PORT=3456
export COOKIE_SECRET='chocolatechips'

Then you can source the file like . config.env.

App Environment

The following environment variables are currently used:

• COOKIE_SECRET: Should be a large, unguessable string. Required.
• PORT: The port that the BadgeKit server should listen on. Defaults to 3000.
• OPENBADGER_URL: The url of the openbadger API that this application should talk to. Required.
• OPENBADGER_SECRET: The shared secret defined by the openbadger app. Required.
• OPENBADGER_SYSTEM: The default system slug to use in the openbadger API. Required.
• DATABASE_DRIVER: Database driver. Required, currently only mysql supported.
• PERSONA_AUDIENCE: Should be set to the app's url (example: "http://localhost:3000"). Required.
• ACCESS_LIST: An array of regular expressions that define "administrator" email patterns. e.g. ["^[email protected]$"]. These users will automatically be members of the OPENBADGER_SYSTEM system.
• API_SECRET: A string used as a shared secret for badgekit's API functions (currently this is only add/delete user functionality). Required.
• DEBUG: If set to true, enables additional logging. Defaults to false.

For a MySQL database, you'll also want to set:

• DATABASE_HOST: Database host. Defaults to localhost.
• DATABASE_USER: Database user.
• DATABASE_PASSWORD: Database password.
• DATABASE_DATABASE: Name of the database to use.

Tests

Tests can be run with npm test.

You will need to define the following configuration parameters through one of the methods outlined above:

• TEST_DATABASE_DRIVER: Database driver. Required, currently only mysql supported.
• TEST_DATABASE_HOST: Database host. Defaults to localhost.
• TEST_DATABASE_USER: Database user.
• TEST_DATABASE_PASSWORD: Database password.
• TEST_DATABASE_DATABASE: Name of the database to use.