Plagiator

Table of Contents

• Introduction
  • Features
• Installation
  • Script
  • Manual
    • Web
    • Python
  • Noteworthy
• Running Locally
• Build
• Research

Please change the user_id for the Moss Connection (register here). You can use the Id for tests, but should change it if you use it more often.

Introduction

Plagiator is a fast, scalable and modern plagiarism checker for Matlab Scripts. To compare the files, MOSS - Measure of Software Similarity is used.

Features

• Interaction
  • GUI (React)
  • GUI (Tkinter)
  • CLI
• Storage
  • SqLite3 Database

Release

see GitHub Releases

Installation

Before launching you need to install the necessary dependencies. Make sure you have Node.js and python 3.6^ or higher installed.

Script

Run ./scripts/install.ps1 or ./scripts/install.sh from the root directory to install all necessary packages and build the current version of the frontend.

The installation script for Windows is currently better because it allows some config options as well as applying a hotfix to pywebview and checking if the venv is already installed

• use the -skip-web flag to skip installing the npm requirements and building the frontend
• use the -skip-app flag to not create the virtual environment and install the python requirements
  • use the -force-recreate-venv flag to, well, force the virtual environment to be recreated. (ignored if -skip-app is present)
  • use the -force-package-reinstall flag to force the python requirements to be reinstalled (ignored if -skip-app is present)

Manual

Note Proceed with caution.

Web

Build the React based frontend

1. cd .\web
2. npm install
3. Build the frontend
   • npm run build to build it once.
   • npm run watch when you plan on changing the Frontend
   • npm run report analyze to see the bundle analysis
   • npm run dev to work on the frontend with hot reload in the browser (no api connection)
4. cd ..

Python

Prepare the python side of things

1. create a virtual environment .venv with python -m venv venv
2. activate it using .\venv\Scripts\activate
3. pip install pywebview

Noteworthy

There are a few bugs in the pywebview python module. Most of them are of visual nature, and we can trickily avoid them, but one bug in particular, that is related to executing the window.kill() function when you want to close the app is resulting in an error message. The error is not relevant, as the programm is exiting anyway and from our understanding is just because the Promise that would be returned to the frontend would is not being returned (because there is no frontend anymore).

To fix this, run the libraryfix.ps1 script (only on windows). You can also manually update the code in .\venv\Lib\site-packages\webview\util.py (~line 204).

Running locally for development

You need to run the frontend in a separate terminal. There you

1. change into the web directory cd .\web
2. build the project while watching for changes npm run watch.

In another terminal for the python backend:

1. make sure to be in the virtual environment (run .\venv\Scripts\activate).
2. run py main.py

Note: You can supply a few start arguments:

usage: main.py [-h] [--nogui] [--gui [{web,legacy}]]
               [--loglevel [{debug,info,warning,error,critical}]]
               [--debug]
               [file1] [file2]

When you make changes in the frontend, restart the python script. It might be necessary to explicitly close the window before you can restart the script.

Build/Freezing

Run build.ps1.

Note: this is currently only available on Windows. You can still run the python script locally but the building of an executable is only possible on Windows.

Research

• A state of art on source code plagiarism detection
• Winnowing: Local Algorithms for Document Fingerprinting
• How MOSS Works