The UQx API is a REST API for taking injested edX research package and making it available for services to leverage. The API supports OAuth2 and Basic authentication.

The ingested databases are designed to work in conjunction with the injestor application: https://github.com/UQ-UQx/injestor. The UQx API can be used to provide data to any number of services, one of which is the Dashboard - https://github.com/UQ-UQx/dashboard_js.

The API should be run on a webserver such as apache on nginx, and be used on a server running mysql and mongo databases which are being populated by the injestor application: https://github.com/UQ-UQx/injestor.

Memcache is also required to be running by default, or you can change it in [BASE_PATH]/uqx_api/settings.py under CACHE, please see: https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/1.4/topics/cache/

[BASE_PATH] is the path where you want the UQx_API installed (such as /var/www/html/api)

Clone the repository

git clone https://github.com/UQ-UQx/uqx_api.git [BASE_PATH]

Install pip requirements

pip install -r requirements.txt

Set UQx API configuration

cp [BASE_PATH]/config.example.py [BASE_PATH]/config.py
vim [BASE_PATH]/config.py
[[EDIT THE VALUES]]

Set the courses to provide an API for

vim [BASE_PATH]/uqx_api/courses.py

Create the api database in your MySQL installation (if not already created by optimus_ingestor).

mysql -u root -p
CREATE DATABASE api;

Sync the django database

cd [BASE_PATH]
python manage.py syncdb

Create one or more users which can authenticate (this uses Django's built in user authentication so you can also connect it via other means)

cd [BASE_PATH]
python manage.py createsuperuser

Configure your web server to run the application, see http://uwsgi-docs.readthedocs.org/en/latest/tutorials/Django_and_nginx.html for more details. A preconfigured uwSGI configuration can be found in the wsgi directory, you can use this with nginx by:

ln -s [BASE_PATH]/wsgi/uqx_api_nginx.conf /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/uqx_api_nginx.conf

Check the configuration files in [BASE_PATH]/wsgi for detailed customisation.

The architecture of the UQx API follows django conventions and relies on the django-rest-framework framework. The /api application contains the API.
APIs are added within the /api/views.py file (inside endpoints()), which then calls the appropraite class/method inside /api/apis. For example, "student_ages" in the endpoints() calls the method genders() within /api/apis/students.py.

The flow of the data is as follows:

Currently the project is at an early stage and does not have reliable tests created.

This project is licensed under the terms of the MIT license.

Currently the injestor project is at a very early stage and unlikely to accept pull requests in a timely fashion as the structure may change without notice. However feel free to open issues that you run into and we can look at them ASAP.

The best contact point apart from opening github issues or comments is to email technical@uqx.uq.edu.au