Courses not showing up in PrairieLearn production

[firasm]

Hello,

I'm trying to get a production PL instance set up, and I'm making some progress (thanks to help from @nwalters512 and @Prostigus so far!)

We've got Google auth setup with myself as admin, and are running in "Production":

But I'm having trouble having my courses show up.

In my config.json file, I have the course repos added:

"config.courseDirs": ["pl_courses/pl-ubc-phys112", "pl_courses/pl-ubc-phys122", "exampleCourse"],
"config.coursesRoot" = 'PrairieLearn/pl_courses';

There is some confusion on whether it's config.courseDirs or just courseDirs, I think I've tried both and it doesn't seem to work.

I am fairly confident my docker volumes setup correctly, because I've bash'd into it and I can see the course repos in the docker container:

bash-4.2# ls PrairieLearn/pl_courses/
pl-ubc-phys112	pl-ubc-phys122

and

bash-4.2# ls PrairieLearn
admin_queries  database  exampleCourse .. ... ...
... ... ... 

and even the exampleCourse doesn't seem to show up.

I wondered if this was permissions related, and I see this:

drwxr-xr-x. 6 2602723  887 141 Jun 28 02:50 pl-ubc-phys112
drwxr-xr-x. 6 2602723  887 141 Jun 28 02:50 pl-ubc-phys122

Is there a step I'm missing somewhere to get the courses show up?

[nwalters512]

To first answer the question about the config: you don't need to prefix the keys with config., e.g. just courseDirs is the correct key. The file you linked to from config.courseDirs is a JavaScript file, and config is the name of the object that holds all the config values.

To answer the main question here: courseDirs is only useful in development mode. That is, it's only used in the instructorLoadFromDisk page:

PrairieLearn/pages/instructorLoadFromDisk/instructorLoadFromDisk.js

Line 43 in 3f0a2de

config.courseDirs || [],

And that page is only made available in development mode:

PrairieLearn/server.js

Line 538 in 3f0a2de

require('./pages/instructorLoadFromDisk/instructorLoadFromDisk'),

This is by design: in production environments, we don't maintain a hardcoded list of courses in the config file. Instead, you need to visit the admin page and use the "Add course" button. You can then fill in the appropriate information, including the Git repository where it should be cloned from.

[firasm]

Perfect ! Thank you! This definitely explains a lot. I was just expecting to have the git repo in the folder and have it just work 😅.