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.
Here are some screenshots of TourneyBot.
# 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 buildThe steps for starting a new tournament are roughly as follows:
- Make sure the CLJS-generated files exist by running
lein clean && lein cljsbuild once - Create a build in the
00-publishfolder with the commandgrunt build - Copy the
00-publish/folder to a public web server that has PHP installed. - Edit the
info.mdfile as appropriate for your tournament. - Edit the
tournament.jsonfile as appropriate for your tournament. - Set a password in
api.php
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.
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.