This is a self-contained stack for deploying Moodle with the RES Moodle plugin (running on Apache) and MariaDB (with the Moodle database). It runs standalone on a single machine, or can be deployed to Amazon Web Services (AWS).
The stack uses Docker to build the images and docker-compose to run them in such a way that they can communicate with each other.
The RES Moodle plugin is built on the Docker image using
res_moodle_plugin_distro_maker.
To run the stack for development purposes, you need to ensure that the following domain name resolves to the same IP address as localhost on your machine:
moodle
This can be done by editing your hosts file (e.g. /etc/hosts on a Linux machine).
You also need the following software to build the images:
You can then run a Moodle instance on Apache + MariaDB with:
git submodule init
git submodule update --remote
docker-compose up --build
Note that if you subsequently update res_moodle_plugin_distro_maker,
you will need to update the git submodule with
git submodule update --remote
before you run docker-compose again.
Once running, Moodle will be accessible at http://moodle.
Admin username/password: admin/admin.
The RES Moodle plugin can be accessed as follows:
- Go to the test course (set up by default in the Docker image).
- Login with admin/admin.
- Go to "Site home" (left-hand menu).
- Click on the cog (top right) and select "Turn editing on" for the course.
- Click on "Add activity or resource".
- Select "URL" from the pop-up (right at the bottom on the left) and click "Add".
- Click the "Choose a link" button, then select "RES" from the list of available plugins.
This stack can be deployed to AWS with a small amount of pain, as explained below. (Note that while the URIs given reference eu-west-1, they should work for other regions.)
You will need our AWS admin to set up an account and permissions for you.
Install and configure AWS command line tools (these require Python):
pip install awscli
Configure AWS:
aws configure
Follow the prompts:
AWS Access Key ID [None]: <YOUR ACCESS_KEY>
AWS Secret Access Key [None]: <YOUR SECRET_KEY>
Default region name [None]: eu-west-1 (or your default region if different)
Default output format [None]:
Create an ECS Container repository to store each of the two docker images (Apache, MariaDB) into. I did this via the web console (https://eu-west-1.console.aws.amazon.com/ecs/home?region=eu-west-1#/repositories) and ended up with these repositories:
075239016712.dkr.ecr.eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/res-moodle-plugin_moodle
075239016712.dkr.ecr.eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/res-moodle-plugin_mariadb
Get the login for the container registry:
aws ecr get-login --region eu-west-1
Copy the output command and run it; it looks like this:
docker login -u AWS -p ...verylongstring... -e none https://075239016712.dkr.ecr.eu-west-1.amazonaws.com
Build the images:
docker-compose build
Tag the images:
docker tag res-moodle-plugin_moodle 075239016712.dkr.ecr.eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/res-moodle-plugin_moodle
docker tag res-moodle-plugin_mariadb 075239016712.dkr.ecr.eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/res-moodle-plugin_mariadb
(Note the tag for the image includes the domain name you got when you called aws ecr get-login above.)
Push them to the container registry:
docker push 075239016712.dkr.ecr.eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/res-moodle-plugin_moodle
docker push 075239016712.dkr.ecr.eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/res-moodle-plugin_mariadb
The Docker images can be deployed to AWS using the ECS CLI tool (http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonECS/latest/developerguide/ECS_CLI_Configuration.html), which supports docker-compose.
Install ecs-cli as per the instructions.
(For the following parts, I followed the tutorial at http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonECS/latest/developerguide/ECS_CLI_tutorial.html.)
Configure your access credentials:
ecs-cli configure --region eu-west-1 --access-key $AWS_ACCESS_KEY --secret-key $AWS_SECRET_KEY --cluster res-moodle-plugin
Create the cluster:
ecs-cli up --keypair $SSH_KEY_PAIR --capability-iam --size 1 --instance-type t2.micro --vpc vpc-48e2c02c --subnets subnet-f5b38583,subnet-90f9cbf4
$SSH_KEY_PAIR should be the name of a key pair registered for ECS (I found this under https://eu-west-1.console.aws.amazon.com/ec2/v2/home?region=eu-west-1#KeyPairs). The --vpc and --subnets values came from my AWS admin.
(NB if you import a public key at this point, you should remove the BEGIN...END lines when you do the import.)
The docker-compose config for deployment is in docker-compose.dist.yml. For demo purposes, a single instance can be used to host all of the images; this is why a mem_limit setting is in the config, to ensure that the individual images get the memory they need. If a larger instance is being used, this should be modified to use as much of the available memory as possible.
Get the domain name for the instance (via the EC2 console), then edit the variables at the top of the aws-task-def.sh script to match this and the names of your repositories.
Create a task definition which is going to run on the cluster:
./aws-task-def.sh
Start the task on the cluster:
aws ecs run-task --task-definition ecscompose-res-moodle-plugin-task --cluster res-moodle-plugin
Moodle should now be available at http://<instance domain name>.
Elliot Smith - [email protected]
Copyright © 2017 BBC
This project is licensed under the terms of the Apache License, version 2.0 (see LICENCE-APACHE.txt).