GOAT

GOAT is a long-term tournament organisation assistant, currently targeted at Go tournaments.

It'll help you manage registrations, pairing, sending reminder e-mails, collecting and processing results.

% perldoc goat

should answer most of your questions. See below for install tips and additionnal support scripts.

LICENSE

Copyright (C) 2006-2018 Yves Rutschle

This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.

The full text for the General Public License is here: http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html

HOW TO INSTALL

Install the dependencies:

        apt-get install libtime-parsedate-perl libemail-filter-perl libemail-valid-perl libdatetime-perl libdatetime-locale-perl libhtml-table-perl libdatetime-timezone-perl libdevel-cover-perl libtemplate-perl libmime-tools-perl libemail-reply-perl libemail-sender-perl libyaml-perl libdata-ical-perl libdatetime-format-ical-perl libdata-uuid-perl libparse-recdescent-perl libcgi-pm-perl libmail-imapclient-perl libtext-multimarkdown-perl
        cpan Algorithm::Pair::Best2

The test suite will probably require the en_US.UTF-8 locale to be installed, which is done with dpkg-reconfigure locales.

Copy the Goat files to the install directory (e.g. /opt/goat). Add that directory to $PATH (so the system finds the various scripts) and to $PERL5LIB (so the scripts find the libraries).

Then create a work directory. Copy the installation's example.cfg as goat.cfg and edit that file (at least the directories). If you plan to run several tournaments in the same directory, you can do that by creating several config files; just make sure to specify one tournament_file per tournament in the configuration; then you can specify which tournament to work on with the --file option which is available on all command line programs. If you don't specify any, the programs will pick goat.cfg as default: if you're running several tournaments, it's a good idea to have no file called that so you always have to specify which tournament to work on.

Add the install directory to $PATH and to $PERL5LIB so the system finds the binaries, and the binaries find the libraries, e.g.:

export PATH=$PATH:/opt/goat
export PERL5LIB=/opt/goat

Goat is called in 2 ways: on receiving a mail that contains a command; and regularly, to send out reminders.

Mail reception

There are two strategies to get mail to Goat: On Unix, get the MTA to deliver directly to a Goat local user; or in general (Unix or others), get Goat to monitor an IMAP mailbox.

Local forward file

This method will only work on a Unix system that receives the e-mail directly, where the local MTA (Exim, Postfix, ...) is set up to use local .forward files.

Create a goat user account, then create a .forward file that contains:

| /home/goat/frontend

Then we create the frontend script that will set up environment variables for Goat upon reception of an e-mail.

The frontend script will set up two environment variables: PATH and PERL5LIB, then call mail_in.

E.g.: my /home/goat/frontend:

#! /bin/sh

export PATH=$PATH:/opt/goat
export PERL5LIB=/opt/goat

mail_in

(and set it as executable)

Now all e-mail received by the goat user is processed by goat.

Usually in this setting Goat can send e-mail using the available local sendmail command so you don't need to set up SMTP.

IMAP Client

The other way to receive e-mail is by setting up a standard IMAP account. This incurrs a wee overhead compared to the previous solution, but should let you run Goat with almost any e-mail provider including Gmail.

Set up PATH and PERL5LIB environment variables as above, before starting imap_frontend so probably in your .bashrc.

Set up the IMAP and SMTP settings in the goat.cfg configuration file, then simply run:

imap_frontend

This will monitor the mailbox, and whenever a new mail arrives, it'll feed it to mail_in which processes Goat commands.

If you don't want to have a process running all the time, you can also run it regularly in a crontab and request to exit after one poll:

PATH=$PATH:/opt/goat
PERL5LIB=/opt/goat
0/15 * * *      imap_frontend --once

This will check e-mail every 15 minutes.

Usually if you're receiving e-mail through IMAP, you also need to send e-mail through the corresponding SMTP server, so you'll need to set up the corresponding setting in goat.cfg.

Crontab

We also need to call Goat regularly to send out reminders. Add a crontab entry for the goat user:

PATH=$PATH:/opt/goat
PERL5LIB=/opt/goat
0 0 * * *       goat >> /var/log/goat/cron

Now goat will run once a day to send out reminders if needed.

Other commands

You can register users with the register script. You can use Goat's built-in pairing algorithm using the pair script (all these scripts are self-documented:

<script> --help

will hopefully give you all the information you need.)

To create a single game, use add_game. To remove a single game, use del_game.

Same goes with add_player and del_player. In general all these only apply to the current round.