ARSnova

ARSnova is a modern approach to Audience Response Systems (ARS). It is released under the GPLv3 license, and is offered as a Software as a Service free of charge. Head over to arsnova.eu to see it in action.

ARSnova consists of two projects: the mobile client and the server. This repository contains the server code. You will find the client at thm-projects/arsnova-st2-js. However, you do not need to download both respositories in order to get started.

Getting Started

This is the main repository. Almost all dependencies (including the mobile client) are managed for you by Maven. The mobile client is served via index.html, and optionally via developer.html.

Configuration

You will need to do some configuration work upfront.

• Add a new directory "arsnova" in /etc, and create a copy of arsnova.properties.example named arsnova.properties in this directory.
• Change settings to match your environment

Server

In order to build up a full featured server installation containing ARSnova and CouchDB you have to install at least the following services:

• Apache Tomcat 7.0.29 (or newer)
• Apache Webserver 2.2 or newer with builtin modules mod_proxy, mod_proxy_ajp and mod_proxy_http
• Apache CouchDB

Make sure all services are installed. Next step is to configure the Apache Webserver. Find the configuration file or create a new one for use with a virtual host. This depends on your needs. At least you should have a configuration containing these settings:

<Location />
	ProxyPass ajp://127.0.0.1:8009/
	ProxyPassReverse ajp://127.0.0.1:8009/
</Location>

All requests will be sent to your Apache Tomcat servlet container, using AJP running on port 8009.

To enable the required Apache Webserver modules simply type:

# a2enmod proxy
# a2enmod proxy_ajp
# a2enmod proxy_http

The configuration is ready for development usage. Finally, you should (re)start all services. ARSnova is now listening on HTTP port 80.

Database

We provide a script that will set up all database essentials. This "Setup Tool" is located at https://github.com/thm-projects/setuptool. Make sure you have configured your database credentials inside the ARSnova configuration file: you will need to have the entries couchdb.username and couchdb.password.

Production Use

If you intend to use ARSnova in productive environments, you will have to do some additional configuration work.

Session Persistence

Look for your Tomcat configuration directory and change the file "context.xml" to match this example:

<Context>
	<Manager pathname="/path/to/tomcat/sessions/arsnova.ser"/>
</Context> 

This will enable session persistence across restarts as described here.

HTTPS

To protect requests and responses you should use HTTPS and configure your Apache Webserver installation to redirect all traffic according to this example.

Finally you should (re)start all services. ARSnova is now listening on HTTP port 80 and 443.

Securing Your Web Socket Connection

To provide SSL websocket encryption, you have to provide the servers SSL key and certificate in a Java keystore. The following steps will guide you through this process.

Use your webserver certificate, private key and certificate chain to create a PKCS12 keystore:

openssl pkcs12 -export -in <servercert>.crt \
				-inkey <serverkey>.key \
               	-out keystore.p12 -name 1 \
	           	-certfile <your_cert_chain_file>

You will be asked for a password for your PKCS12 keystore. This password must be used for importing this keystore into your java keystore. The import can be done using this command:

keytool -importkeystore \
	    -deststorepass <your_java_keystore_password> \
	    -destkeypass <your_java_keystore_password> \
	    -destkeystore arsnova.jks \
    	-srckeystore keystore.p12 \
    	-srcstoretype PKCS12 \
    	-srcstorepass <your_pkcs12_keystore_password> \
    	-alias 1

Be sure to provide the correct certificate and key file names and to use the correct passwords for your keystore.

The last step is to find your ARSnova configuration file (see step "Configuration" above), setup the location of your Java keystore and its password.

security.ssl=true
security.keystore=<your keystore location>
security.storepass=<your keystore password>

Credits

ARSnova is powered by Technische Hochschule Mittelhessen - University of Applied Sciences.