Dockerized Education Platform

This is a dockerized version of the education platform for trying out the platform locally.

Further details on the platform can be found on the main platform wiki page.

Any bugs, feature requests, or suggestions can be added to the issue tracker.

Prerequisites

Core

1. GIT
2. Docker
3. Docker Compose

System

1. Disk space - 20 GB
2. Memory - 3 GB

If using a linux based virtual machine, the minimum recommended settings of 3GB system memory and 30GB virtual disk should be used.

Mac Preconfiguration

Docker on Mac defaults to 2GB of system memory which is not sufficient since Docker uses virtualisation to run containers on Mac. The minimum recommended value to use as the minimum Docker memory limit is 6GB. See the Docker desktop documentation for further details on how to configure this.

Windows Preconfiguration

If using Windows to run the platform, a few additional steps are required.

• Enable long paths for git.

git config --global core.longpaths true

• If the mdenet/educationplatfom-docker repository has previously been checked out, you may have to clear submodule indexes so that file line endings re-normalised correctly.

git submodule foreach 'git rm --cached -r .'

• Ensure that the docker daemon is running by starting Docker Desktop from the start menu or by powershell command

& "[DOCKER_INSTALL_PATH]\Docker\Docker Desktop.exe" 

where DOCKER_INSTALL_PATH is the path to install docker which usually defaults to C:\Program Files\Docker.

• Ensure that the docker is set to use the linux engine by right-clicking the Docker Desktop icon in the system tray menu and selecting use linux engine or by running the command

[DOCKER_INSTALL_PATH]\Docker\DockerCli.exe -SwitchDaemon -SwitchLinuxEngine

Checkout the repository

Use either command to clone the repository and all of its submodules.

Via https -

git clone --recurse-submodules https://github.com/mdenet/educationplatform-docker.git

Via ssh -

git clone --recurse-submodules git@github.com:mdenet/educationplatform-docker.git

Note that for ssh access you must configure your account with a key.

Build and run the docker image

This builds the docker images and starts the platform servers.

cd ./educationplatform-docker

docker compose up --build 

Note it may take approximately 10 minutes the first time the platform is built.

Access the platform

Once docker has started the containers, the platform will be available at http://127.0.0.1:8080

403 Error

If a 403 forbidden permissions error is encountered, the permission of the files used in the docker volumes must be configured. For linux based system run the following command from the educationplatform-docker directory.

chmod -R 755 {public,educationplatform-examples} 

Note - that browsers cache the platform pages so if changes are made to an activity or its files hard refresh should be used to reload the page by pressing ctrl+F5 or cmd+shift+R.

Stopping the platform

To safely stop the platform use ctrl-c in the terminal running the platform.