Installing a Plom Server

The instructions here are for the installation of a Plom server. This not required by your markers; they only need to install the Plom client.

You can either use Docker to run a server or install Plom from source.

Using Docker to run a server

docker pull plomgrading/server
docker run -it --rm -p 41984:41984 plomgrading/server

By default, this will launch a demo server.

The data for the test is in /exam inside the Docker image. You can use your own local directory with -v:

mkdir my_test
docker run -it --rm -P -v $PWD/my_test:/exam plomgrading/server

(here -P will use a random high port on the host).

You can override the default command, for example:

docker run -it --rm -v $PWD/my_test:/exam plomgrading/server plom-create newspec --demo
docker run -it --rm -v $PWD/my_test:/exam plomgrading/server plom-server init mysrv
docker run -it --rm -P -v $PWD/my_test:/exam plomgrading/server plom-server launch

Alternatively you can get a shell and work inside the image:

docker run -it --rm plomgrading/server /bin/bash
plom-create newspec --demo

You can also connect a shell to a running image using exec:

docker exec -it <name> /bin/bash

where <name> can found using docker ps; its something like ornery_colin.

Installation from source

Step 1 - Required packages

Plom requires a number of components: installation is documented here for GNU/Linux and here for macOS. (Those links point to the development sources; they may need to be adjusted if you are using an earlier release.)

Step 2 - Install Plom via pip

$ pip3 install plom

You will then be able to run the various Plom commands. Try running plom-create and you should see something like:

$ plom-create --version
plom-create 0.10.0

Step 3 (optional) - Install the repository

You really only need to do this if you want to take a look at the source code. You will need to have a working git install.

$ git clone https://gitlab.com/plom/plom/

There is a lot in the repo and we apologise that some of the documentation in the repo is out of date. We really need codevelopers to help!

What to do next

You are ready to run a demo.