"local" config files

[Alex-Jordan]

At the weekly meeting yesterday, I proposed the following. It would generally be unhelpful, but would help situations like the Runestone server. I have some questions about how it might at least have a higher chance to be helpful in other situations.

1. In conf/ there is a subfolder. Say, conf/local/ but I'd love to hear a better default name. Of course, it is customizable in `defaults.conf'.
2. This folder has some .conf files. My use case is that there would be a different one for each institution. I suppose you might have one that uses LTI, and one that doesn't. Things like that.
3. When you Add Course from the admin course, if this folder is non-empty, then you have a select menu listing the available .conf files from this folder. Say you choose one.
4. When the course.conf file is written for the new course, it ends with include(...) to include the specified .conf file.

This will help me more quickly set up new courses with their institutional configurations. Now, how should this interact with a different thing that already exists on the Add Course page: copying an old course's course.conf'?

1. Should the old course.conf file be copied, and the include line is appended to the end of it?
2. Or should these inputs be mutually exclusive? That is, if you are copying an old course's course.conf file, should that disable your ability to even select one of these "local" config files in the first place?

I lean toward the latter.

If the latter, should the current checkbox option for copying the old course's course.conf file be merged into the new Select field for local config files?

[drgrice1]

I think it is easiest to make the option to copy the old course's course.conf file should be mutually exclusive from including an existing .conf file in the conf/local location. Probably go with that for now. And in that case, the option to copy the old course.conf file should be in the new select field for local config files.

[somiaj]

I would think if you are going to hook into course.conf you use the include first so course overrides can still be used. Though I wonder if it is worth just adding the include while loading the course environment after it loads the default environment but before the course.conf file is loaded. I wasn't in the meeting so maybe this was discussed. I think the downside to this approach is it might require configuring the file to load in some other file or store it in the database. Though I guess in your use case, your users don't have access to course.conf so it makes it a good place to do this.

[drgrice1]

If we go with the proposal of making copying a course.conf file being mutually exclusive from adding the include, then there is nothing before or after the include.

Also, in any case users do not have access to the course.conf file.

There is no need for anything with the database with this.

[drgrice1]

I thought of a good reason that the option to copy an old course course.conf file and this new include option should be mutually exclusive. If not, then you might have the case that the copied course file already includes the selected file. Of course that will work, but it is not desirable, and if that happens several semesters in a row it would start to introduce inefficiency.

[Alex-Jordan]

I'd like to put these conf files in a folder in the admin course, so the admin can use the web interface to add or edit these. But is that doable? So far, something like include('../courses/admin/conf/myconf.conf'); is not working.

[drgrice1]

The include method is encoded to only include files that are inside the webwork2 directory. It does not allow including anything using ... That would not be a reliable way to do it in any case, because the courses directory need not be at that location relative to the webwork2 directory. That is the default, but that can be changed.

[Alex-Jordan]

Yeah, I was working with a path based on $webworkDirs{courses}, but I can appreciate not wanting include to travel outside of the webwork2 directory.

So these config files need to live in webwork2/, and webwork2/conf/ seems like the right place for a containing folder. But I don't want webwork2/conf/local/ to be the default, because we have webwork2/conf/localOverrides and it would mess up automcompletion. What's a good default name for the folder containing these config files?

[drgrice1]

I am not sure. Perhaps conf/courses? To match the courses directory?