RIT Bus + Docker Compose

The Project

RIT Bus is a GPL/FOSS project for viewing the RIT bus timetables. The project pulls route information from RIT’s bus schedule website, then presents that information to the user in terms of where roughly the bus is expected to be.

Why This Project

I first learned about the project because of the HFOSS Discord server. The project was big enough to garner its own channel where a lot of discussions around active development were ongoing.

Our Comm Arch group also decided to cover this project for our final presentation. Almost unanimously, our group thought that it would be a good project to contribute to which left an impact in my mind. Additionally, Adrian (our TA) recommended it as a good project to contribute to because of how close the project is tied to FOSS@RIT.

The project provides somewhat comprehensive documentation for how to setup a development environment; however, I did have to parse through some configuration files to figure out how to setup a connection to an external service.

The Issue

I decided to work on an issue that dealt with setting up a Docker configuration. I chose this issue because I recently configured a Docker setup for my senior project, so the ideas (and frustrations) behind that were fresh in my head.

I made a configuration that would create a PostgreSQL container using Docker compose that pulls from the existing environment variables. Testing the changes resulted in zero errors and it seems like the configuration just works.

I didn’t have any blockers creating the configuration because the change was completely local and doesn’t interact with the codebase (so it doesn’t involve any other features or bugs).

Merge Status

At time of writing my pull request is still being reviewed.