Moodle is now available

[girish]

@atrilahiji When testing moodle a bit more (plugins etc), what I found is there are many different types of plugins - https://docs.moodle.org/dev/Plugin_types . And each plugin type goes into it's own directory (!). Wow, thats quite insane from a packaging perspective.

Do you know how commonly all these plugins are used for moodle? I can only think of moving the whole code wholesale into /app/data like we do in unmanaged WP. What do you think?

[girish]

The plugin situation is what I feared - https://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=323960 and http://james-moodle.blogspot.com/2015/09/those-pesky-moodle-plugins-and-upgrading.html . You just have to copy files all over.

[A Former User]

@girish oh boy I didn’t really think of this part... I’ll see if I can come up with anything else but moving everything to the data folder is the last resort.

[A Former User]

One option would be picking common types of plugins and supporting those. Like these:

/path/to/moodle/theme/ - themes
/path/to/moodle/mod/ - activity modules and resources
/path/to/moodle/blocks/ - sidebar blocks
/path/to/moodle/question/ - question types/behaviours/formats
/path/to/moodle/course/format/ - course formats
/path/to/moodle/admin/report/ - admin reports
/path/to/moodle/local - Generic plugins for local customisations
/path/to/moodle/auth - Auth plugins
/path/to/moodle/enrol - Enrollment methods
/path/to/moodle/filter - Filters
/path/to/moodle/webservice - Custom webservices
/path/to/moodle/portfolio - Portfolio plugins (useful for Mahara)

Could we symlink those? Part of me is concerned about the "why is x plusing supported on cloudron but not y" for more obscure use cases which might cause more support traffic, but I suppose that part is your call as you and @nebulon are the ones that have to handle that support traffic.

[robi]

sounds like we need to make an upstream PR o improve the plugin directory structure.. then we can symlink just that directory and not individual plugins as they get installed.

is there a config change option on where to save plugins?

[girish]

@atrilahiji It's too much to symlink. I think /app/data it is. Sucks, but can't blame them really. I saw a copyright header from 1999 in the code (!). That was about the time I was learning to program, hee hee.

I tried several plugins and they all really rely on the code writing all over, so there is no point wasting time trying to fit it into Cloudron's packaging model. For a start, I will go with the list you gave me and we can just fixup the package as we go.

[A Former User]

@girish Yeah. Nobody ever said Moodle was well written :^)

But yeah their plugin system is pretty dated. I can push something to Moodle tracker (their JIRA instance) and see if they agree or decide to stick to their old ways.

[A Former User]

@girish I pushed a MR here and my feelings would not be hurt if you decline it: https://git.cloudron.io/cloudron/moodle-app/-/merge_requests/3

This is super sketchy and I'm really not fond of it as a solution. In my mind its either this or move the code to /app/date entirely. Not sustainable the way it is now

[girish]

@atrilahiji It's more complicated unfortunately All those subdirectories already have existing code from upstream. So, let's say mod and course/format have existing subdirectories coming in from moodle release. So, we have to keep a copy and reverse symlink etc. It gets very ugly...

I have moved everything to /app/data now though (I pushed it). Will push a new package shortly. There was a php snippet in the docs that gave me all the interesting plugin directories - https://git.cloudron.io/cloudron/moodle-app/-/blob/master/plugintypes.php . And then I copy them over like https://git.cloudron.io/cloudron/moodle-app/-/blob/master/start.sh#L44

[girish]

@atrilahiji To add to this, I also found that many plugin do require ../../config.php which breaks with symlinks.

[A Former User]

@girish Yeah... the upgrade would get messy.

I was just looking over that. That script is magic.

This is what I get for panic pushing a MR. I'll remove that.

[A Former User]

@girish Oh boy. Automating this has turned out to be quite the struggle. Thanks for all your work! I thought it would be easier than it turned out to be

Egg on face for me

[girish]

@atrilahiji Ha ha, it's fine. Moodle has been requested often and this is hopefully a one time thing. I think the package is good to go now, the tests are done and all the plugins I could get hold of work.

[girish]

Moodle is now marked as stable.