Plan, a timetable generator for NTNU students

This piece of software started out as a simple tool to assist in creating readable timetables for NTNU courses. The earliest version of the site provided this functionality and nothing more. As more fellow students started using the software new features where added based on personal needs and suggestions from other students.

Today the software provides the following:

• Simple interface for adding courses.
• Customizable view of your timetable.
• Easy export to Google-Calendar via iCal.
• PDF-version for printing.
• User defined deadlines.
• Import of course data from ntnu.no or database-dumps.

Required packages

• python3-django
• python3-django-compressor
• python3-lxml
• python3-psycopg2
• python3-pylibmc
• python3-reportlab
• python3-requests
• python3-sentry-sdk
• python3-sphinx
• python3-tqdm
• python3-vobject

Request modifiers and middleware behavior

The app supports a few request modifiers that affect caching, conditional responses, language selection, and debug rendering.

• ?no-cache
  • Bypasses internal response cache reads in views that call plan.common.utils.should_bypass_cache.
  • Currently applies to schedule HTML and iCal views.
• Cache-Control: no-cache
  • Same bypass behavior as ?no-cache for views using should_bypass_cache.
• Pragma: no-cache
  • Same bypass behavior as ?no-cache for views using should_bypass_cache.
• ?no-modified-since
  • Disables If-Modified-Since/Last-Modified short-circuiting in check_modified_since.
  • Does not disable ETag/If-None-Match handling.
• ?debug
  • Only active when DEBUG=True.
  • Enables text_debug_middleware, which converts non-HTML responses to debug-friendly HTML output.

Notes on no-cache

• no-cache is a response-cache bypass, not a full data-cache bypass.
• It bypasses rendered response/view caches (for example schedule HTML and iCal response cache lookups).
• It does not automatically bypass lower-level caches such as schedule/data/DB-derived caches unless a specific code path forwards a separate bypass flag.
• Conditional 304 Not Modified responses may still be returned first if ETag/conditional headers match.

Language query behavior

• Locale middleware currently interprets the raw query string as the language code (for example ?nb), not key/value pairs like ?lang=nb.

Local dev: runserver

Use unified settings for runserver. nix develop sets local data, cache, and Postgres socket paths:

• DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE=plan.settings
• DJANGO_DEBUG=true
• DJANGO_DEBUG_TOOLBAR=1 to enable Django Debug Toolbar
• PLAN_BASE_DIR=... to change the default data/ directory

Offline mode prep (once after static/template changes):

./manage.py collectstatic --noinput
DJANGO_COMPRESS_ENABLED=true DJANGO_COMPRESS_OFFLINE=true ./manage.py compress --force

Runserver against helper DB:

nix develop
run-db

In another shell:

nix develop
./manage.py migrate
./manage.py runserver

Container smoke test against helper DB

Use the helper in the dev shell. It loads the Nix image, uses host networking, runs as your current user, and connects to the run-db Unix socket in data/pgdata. It uses data/cache for Django file cache.

nix develop
run-db

In another shell:

nix develop
run-container

Use Podman instead of Docker:

run-container --podman