In August 2017 we implemented Swarthmore College’s PDF accessibility tool for Moodle. This required us to stand up a Node.js application, which was a new experience for us. Our environment was RHEL7, and our preferred web server Apache.

Application deployment

We followed our usual Capistrano principles for deploying the application. We created a simple project with all the Capistrano configuration and then mounted the Swarthmore project as a git submodule in a top-level directory named public. We configured the Capistrano npm module to use public as its working directory to ensure that the various node modules are installed on deployment.

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This is a story about Moodle, PHP, Active Directory, OpenLDAP, and how I stared a problem in the face for two days without realizing what I was looking at.

Pagination

I assumed maintenance of the LDAP syncing scripts plugin (‘local_ldap’) in 2016. One thing I did was to add PHPUnit coverge which I wrote about in Writing LDAP unit tests for a Moodle plugin.

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This is a quick note on building an Apache+Passenger+Ruby 2.4 environment on RHEL7, with an explanation of some odd path issues with libraries and how to resolve them for both regular users and system users.

We’re building a RedHat Enterprise (RHEL) 7 server with Ruby 2.4. We use Passenger to route traffic from Apache to the rails applications hosted on the box. RHEL7, by default, ships with Ruby 2.0.0-p684, which is outdated. To get up to Ruby 2.4, we have to add the software collections repository and then make a few configuration changes.

We start by installing a few packages. I found that we needed three base Ruby packages, plus Passenger:

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Last summer I did a series of posts in conjunction with a talk I gave at WPCampus on Lafayette’s WordPress deployment methodology. At the time the missing piece was a truly automated deployment. We implemented that at the end of August, but I never got around to writing it up until now. We retained our Capistrano methodology, but had GitLab execute the deployment from a container.

Containing Capistrano

In Rolling rocks downhill I described how we used Capistrano to deploy WordPress. The simplest way to automate the deployment and take the local developer out of the picture would be to have GitLab run the Capistrano deployment instead. This requires a few things:

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I’ve written at length about how we deploy WordPress with Composer and Capistrano. This week I’m going to write about how I adapted that workflow for our MediaWiki environments.

We have a couple MediaWiki environments which we manage on behalf of the campus community. The first thing I discovered was that our preferred approach–installing core with a git submodule and extensions with Composer–wasn’t viable. Beginning with MediaWiki 1.26.2 the core product ships with its own Composer dependencies, and extensions may choose to define dependencies of their own. The MediaWiki team supports this model with the composer-merge-plugin, which can combine the core and extension composer.json files on installation. When I attempted to overlay our extensions-as-composer-dependencies model on that environment it broke, and hard.

Instead, I fell back on the older model of nested git submodules. The core code is managed in an integration repository, and each extension is added to that repository as a submodule. The Capistrano git submodule gem handles this situation cleanly. For the extension composer dependencies, I defined a composer.local.json file for each project and added it to the shared files on the web server. In this example, I’m adding support for the SyntaxHighlight extension:

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ImageMagick’s convert command handles image-to-PDF just fine, but by default can spit out a very small image–almost as though it’s “zoomed in.” To get around that, set the density flag when invoking it: convert -density 100% foo.jpg foo.pdf. You may have to play with it a little to get a usable result.

This is a story of how a log file that got too large degraded a production system for a couple days. It illustrates what happens if you dive into a problem without stepping back and asking basic questions.

We use Redmine as an issue tracking/project management platform. It has the capability to ingest emails from standard input. Late last week, we realized that this feature had stopped working. What followed was a lot of time in the weeds which could have been avoided if I’d just stopped to work the problem.

Bouncy bouncy

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I maintain about a dozen plugins in the Moodle plugins repository. I use Moodlerooms’ moodle-plugin-ci project to test all of them on Travis CI. It’s a fantastic tool and rely heavily on it.

This fall I’ve been working on a plugin which, because of various hooks into Lafayette’s internal infrastructure, I’m not releasing publicly. I’d still like to test it in the usual way, so I decided to run the tests on our internal GitLab infrastructure.

Building a container

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A course archiving strategy is the white whale of higher education. I can remember being part of discussions a decade ago about how to keep a Moodle instance at a manageable size while preserving information. There were two challenges: come up with a policy that faculty could support, and execute a reasonable technical implementation of that policy. In this post I’ll discuss the tools we built to implement our chosen policy.

Policy

The policy we crafted with faculty input is straightforward:

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It’s a simple question with a complex answer: in a given academic term, what percentage of our Moodle courses are “active” (used by a faculty member in the teaching of their course). We have to start by figuring out what counts as a “course” in a term, and then come up with an inclusive measurement of activity.

Courses

The basic unit in Moodle is the course. We use the Banner/Luminis Message Broker plugin to create a course for each section of each course which is taught for a given term at Lafayette. Each of these courses has an idnumber which corresponds to the section’s CRN. An exception is crosslisted courses; the LMB plugin creates a merged course with a special idnumber.

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