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TourneyBot

This project is for the web application used to run the Houston Indoor Ultimate tournament. An installation of this project can be seen at houstonindoor.com

The Houston Indoor tournament uses a Swiss system with some unique criteria. In particular, since there is typically only one field available for an indoor tournament, field time needs to be maximized with a game always playing. The tournament is scheduled with exactly one minute of down time between games; just enough time for teams to switch on and off the field.

This is a challenge for a Swiss system where you do not know the next round's matchups until all the games in a round are played. This application provides tools for dealing with this situation and ensuring that a "forward schedule" is always available.

In addition, it provides a mobile-friendly website where players can see the current schedule, their team results, and general tournament information. The public-facing website receives near-realtime updates of all tournament information, so players do not need to refresh the page in order to see the latest information. See the architecture section for more information about this feature.

Screenshots

Here are some screenshots of TourneyBot.

Development Setup

Install Leiningen and Node.js

# install node_modules (one-time)
npm install

# you may wish the run the following commands in separate console tabs / windows

# build CLJS files
lein clean && lein cljsbuild auto

# compile LESS into CSS
grunt watch

# run a local web server out of public/ on port 9955
node server.js 9955

# produce a build in the 00-publish/ folder
grunt build

Installation

The steps for starting a new tournament are roughly as follows:

  1. Make sure the CLJS-generated files exist by running lein clean && lein cljsbuild once
  2. Create a build in the 00-publish folder with the command grunt build
  3. Copy the 00-publish/ folder to a public web server that has PHP installed.
  4. Edit the info.md file as appropriate for your tournament.
  5. Edit the tournament.json file as appropriate for your tournament.
  6. Set a password in api.php

Architecture

TourneyBot can be thought of as two separate applications that are designed to work together: the client side and the admin side.

The entire tournament state is held in the tournament.json file. The client side polls for that file every few seconds and updates the UI accordingly. The admin side contains functions that modify tournament.json and save it to the server. You could, for example, run an entire tournament by editing the tournament.json file directly.

The Info page is held in info.md and requested on initial load, then again every 5 minutes. It is expected that the info page will not change very much while the tournament is happening.

The role of PHP in TourneyBot is minimal and could be swapped out for something else easily. It was just the most convenient hosting option for me for the 2016 tournament.

Future Development

TourneyBot was primarily created for the 2016 Houston Indoor Ultimate Tournament and has a lot of code to deal with the unique constraints of that tournament.

It would be great to extend this project and make it more flexible for other Ultimate tournament formats. Please reach out or post in the issues if you are interested in helping with that.

License

ISC License