Introduction

TicketVise is a ticket system that makes answering questions from students easier than ever before. The currently used mailing list has many flaws, such as confusion about who will answer what. In addition to that questions are often forgotten and there is a need for a second communication channel for discussion amongst assistants. TicketVise solves this as it forms a central place for students to ask questions via tickets, which can be assigned to assistants both automatically and manually to give more clarity about who answers what. The built-in Canvas integration in combination with a private discussion section for the teaching team gets rid of coordination overhead as no second communication channel is required (e.g. Slack or Telegram). TicketVise comes with many more features, such as a notification system, course/user statistics and markdown support.

Deployment

Generate SSL certificates

docker run -it --rm --name certbot -p 80:80 \
          -v "ticketvise_cert_conf:/etc/letsencrypt" \
          -v "ticketvise_cert_www:/var/www/certbot" \
          certbot/certbot certonly \
          --standalone \
          -w /var/www/certbot \
          --email <EMAIL> \
          -d <DOMAIN>

Deploy to Docker Stack

docker stack deploy -c docker-compose.yml -c docker-compose.prod.yml ticketvise

NOTE: IPv6 has to be disabled, because Docker Swawrm does not support it.

Troubleshooting

Cronjobs

Access the docker container running the backend image. You can find the container id by running docker ps.

docker exec -it <backend_container_id> bash

View the cronjob logs.

cat /var/log/cron.log