moodle-plugin-repo

Experimental script to generate composer repository for Moodle plugin directory.

The idea of this is to generate a packages.json file in the composer repository format (https://getcomposer.org/doc/05-repositories.md#composer) which can be used to install Moodle plugins in the right place using Composer (see also https://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=275466).

The plugins are exposed as moodle-plugin-db/plugin_name, and the versions are the full 10-digit version number. They are tagged with the correct type to allow the composer installers to put them in the right place in the Moodle code tree.

Example composer.json

{
    "name": "michael/mdb-test",
    "repositories": [
      {
        "type": "composer",
        "url": "http://micaherne.github.io/moodle-plugin-repo/"
      },
      {
        "packagist": false
      }
    ],
    "minimum-stability": "dev",
    "require": {
        "moodle-plugin-db/theme_aardvark": "2013080900",
        "moodle-plugin-db/atto_morebackcolors": "*",
        "moodle-plugin-db/mod_attendance": "*"
    }
}

Issues

This is very much a proof of concept, and it's still not clear to me if it's even worth doing! There are many things that would need to be sorted out before something like this could be used sensibly.

1. The version numbers aren't in the usual semantic versioning format usually used by composer, so you can install specific versions (also "*" for the latest works as expected) but the version ranges syntax doesn't really work.
2. Author information isn't exposed by the plugin database API, so we can't attribute the plugins properly in the generated metadata.
3. Where a plugin has a Github repository which could be used by Composer, we're not using it. Worse, when a plugin has a composer.json file we're ignoring it.
4. To install into an existing Moodle download (which is kind of the idea), you need to edit the composer.json file, which is a core Moodle file. Alternatively, you need to mess around with the COMPOSER environment variable to use a different filename.
5. There's no actual dependency management, so you have to work out the relevant versions yourself. In theory, we could add requires for Moodle versions but, because the Moodle composer.json doesn't have a name or version, this would have to be added manually before running composer install otherwise you'd end up with a whole copy of Moodle in your vendor directory.
6. We can't check the MD5 of the download to ensure its integrity.
7. The plugin database doesn't appear to have explicit license information, so we can't expose it in the repo.