Helping End-users Debug Their Trigger-Action Programs

Introduction

This repository is a fullstack web-application that helps end-users debug their trigger-action programs in smart homes. It is excuted as serveral docker containers - postgres, backend, frontend and nginx.

Postgres

The postgres container maintains a PostgresSQL database to support the system. User information, trigger-action program information, users' traces, etc. are stored in the database.

Backend

The backend container runs a Django server that provides a varieties of APIs for the frontend. It provides APIs that log-in a user, APIs that fetch TAP rules, APIs that provide TAP patches, etc. The main algorithms for this project are executed in the backend.

Frontend

The frontend container runs Angular as a frontend server. When users access our website through a browser, the frontend server send a copy of the website to the brower. Visual designs of the interface are done in the frontend code.

Nginx

The nginx container runs a service listening on the machine's 80 and 443 port. It forwards requests from end-users to the correct target destinations (i.e. web request to frontend, API calls to backend).

You can build the fullstack web-application through docker-compose with our pre-written scripts.

Pre-requisites

TapDebug runs as a fullstack web-application on a Linux server. To connect it with a Home I/O simulator, it has to be accessible on a url (e.g. my.example.url) from the Windows machine running the simulator.

You need to install docker, docker-compose and git-lhs on the server.

• Setting up docker
• Setting up docker-compose

TapDebug does not support Windows or Windows Subsystem Linux. We tested it on native Ubuntu 18.04 and 20.04.

Download TapDebug

git clone [email protected]:UChicagoSUPERgroup/tapdebug.git
cd tapdebug

Configure the server url

Modify the "host_domain" field in settings.json into your server's url (e.g. my.example.url).

Build/run TapDebug

To initialize TapDebug (1st execution), run:

./start_server_dev.sh --data data/homeio.sql

This will build all our images and run the containers. It will start a local web-application at port 80. If you wish to run the server on a different url from "localhost", please modify the url in settings.json. Warning: This sql contains admin name/password. To use TapDebug under production, please update them to avoid being attacked.

To run TapDebug without initialization (keeping the data), run:

./start_server_dev.sh

Create a user

On a separate terminal on the server, under the tapdebug folder, run:

docker-compose exec -it backend python3 manage.py createusers -m [interface] [usercode]

This will create a user with "usercode" who will be able to access the interface specified.

Options for [interface] include:

• "c": Control interface where users manually manage trigger-action programs.
• "nf": Explicit-Feedback interface where users can provide explicit behavioral feedback to modify TAP rules.
• "nn": Implicit-Feedback interface where the system learns to modify TAP rules from traces.

Connect a Home I/O simulator

Now please refer to TapDebug Home I/O Connector for more details running Home I/O.

Test our interface

Visit the following url to access the interface: my.example.url/[usercode]/survey/[taskid].

Options for "taskid" are 6, 1, 3, 4, 5 and 12, representing task 0-5 in our paper. In these task pages, we have set up the TAP rules we used in our study.