MIT Open

This application provides a central interface from which learners can browse MIT courses.

SECTIONS

1. Initial Setup
2. Code Generation
3. Committing & Formatting
4. Optional Setup

Initial Setup

MIT Open follows the same initial setup steps outlined in the common OL web app guide. Run through those steps including the addition of /etc/hosts aliases and the optional step for running the createsuperuser command.

Configure required .env settings

The following settings must be configured before running the app:

• COMPOSE_PROFILES

  Controls which docker containers run. To run them all, use COMPOSE_PROFILES=backend,frontend. See Frontend Development for more.

• INDEXING_API_USERNAME

  At least to start out, this should be set to the username of the superuser you created above.

• MAILGUN_KEY and MAILGUN_SENDER_DOMAIN

  You can set these values to any non-empty string value if email-sending functionality is not needed. It's recommended that you eventually configure the site to be able to send emails. Those configuration steps can be found below.

Loading Data

The MIT Open platform aggregates data from many sources. These data are populated by ETL (extract, transform, load) pipelines that run automatically on a regular schedule. Django management commands are also available to force the pipelines to run—particularly useful for local development.

To load data from xpro, for example, ensure you have the relevant environment variables

XPRO_CATALOG_API_URL
XPRO_COURSES_API_URL

and run

docker compose run --rm web python manage.py backpopulate_xpro_data

See learning_resources/management/commands and main/settings_course_etl.py for more ETL commands and their relevant environment variables.

Frontend Development

The frontend package root is at ./frontends. A watch container is provided to serve and rebuild the front end when there are changes to source files, which is started alongside backing services with docker compose up.

Package scripts are also provided for building and serving the frontend in isolation. More detail can be found in the Frontend README.

Code Generation

MIT Open uses drf-spectacular to generate and OpenAPI spec from Django views. Additionally, we use OpenAPITools/openapi-generator to generate Typescript declarations and an API Client. These generated files are checked into source control; CI checks that they are up-to-date. To regenerate these files, run

./scripts/generate_openapi.sh

Committing & Formatting

To ensure commits to GitHub are safe, first install pre-commit:

pip install pre_commit
pre-commit install

Running pre-commit can confirm your commit is safe to be pushed to GitHub and correctly formatted:

pre-commit run --all-files

To automatically install precommit hooks when cloning a repo, you can run this:

git config --global init.templateDir ~/.git-template
pre-commit init-templatedir ~/.git-template

Optional Setup

Described below are some setup steps that are not strictly necessary for running MIT Open

Enabling email

The app is usable without email-sending capability, but there is a lot of app functionality that depends on it. The following variables will need to be set in your .env file - please reach out to a fellow developer or devops for the correct values.

MAILGUN_SENDER_DOMAIN
MAILGUN_URL
MAILGUN_KEY

Additionally, you'll need to set MAILGUN_RECIPIENT_OVERRIDE to your own email address so any emails sent from the app will be delivered to you.

Loading fixture files

Run the following to load platforms, departments, and offers. This populates the database with the fixture files contained in learning_resources/fixtures. Note that you will first need to run the Django models to schema migrations detailed in the Handbook Initial Setup step. This is already done for you when bringing up your local (development) environment.

docker compose run --rm web python manage.py loaddata platforms departments offered_by

Enabling image uploads to S3

⚠️ NOTE: Article cover image thumbnails will be broken unless this is configured ⚠️

Article posts give users the option to upload a cover image, and we show a thumbnail for that image in post listings. We use Embedly to generate that thumbnail, so they will appear as broken images unless you configure your app to upload to S3. Steps:

1. Set MITOPEN_USE_S3=True in .env

2. Also in .env, set these AWS variables: AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID, AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY, AWS_STORAGE_BUCKET_NAME

   These values can be copied directly from the Open Discussions CI Heroku settings, or a fellow dev can provide them.

Enabling searching the course catalog on opensearch

To enable searching the course catalog on opensearch, run through these steps:

1. Start the services with docker compose up
2. With the above running, run this management command, which kicks off a celery task, to create an opensearch index:

   docker compose  run web python manage.py recreate_index --all
   

   If there is an error running the above command, observe what traceback gets logged in the celery service.
3. Once created and with docker compose up running, hit this endpoint in your browser to see if the index exists: http://localhost:9101/discussions_local_all_default/_search
4. If yes, to run a specific query, make a POST request (using curl, Postman, Python requests, etc.) to the above endpoint with a json payload. For example, to search for all courses, run a query with Content-Type as application/json and with a body {"query":{"term":{"object_type":"course"}}}

Running the app in a notebook

This repo includes a config for running a Jupyter notebook in a Docker container. This enables you to do in a Jupyter notebook anything you might otherwise do in a Django shell. To get started:

• Copy the example file

  # Choose any name for the resulting .ipynb file
  cp app.ipynb.example app.ipynb

• Build the notebook container (for first time use, or when requirements change)

  docker compose -f docker-compose-notebook.yml build

• Run all the standard containers (docker compose up)
• In another terminal window, run the notebook container

  docker compose -f docker-compose-notebook.yml run --rm --service-ports notebook

• The notebook container log output will indicate a URL at which you can interact with the notebook server.
• After visiting the notebook url, click the .ipynb file that you created to run the notebook
• Execute the first block to confirm it's working properly (click inside the block and press Shift+Enter)

From there, you should be able to run code snippets with a live Django app just like you would in a Django shell.

Connecting with an OpenID Connect provider for authentication

The MIT Open application relies on an OpenID Connect client provided by Keycloak for authentication.

The following environment variables must be defined using values from a Keycloak instance:

• SOCIAL_AUTH_OL_OIDC_OIDC_ENDPOINT - The base URI for OpenID Connect discovery, https://<OIDC_ENDPOINT>/ without .well-known/openid-configuration.

• OIDC_ENDPOINT - The base URI for OpenID Connect discovery, https://<OIDC_ENDPOINT>/ without .well-known/openid-configuration.

• SOCIAL_AUTH_OL_OIDC_KEY - The client ID provided by the OpenID Connect provider.

• SOCIAL_AUTH_OL_OIDC_SECRET - The client secret provided by the OpenID Connect provider.

• AUTHORIZATION_URL - Provider endpoint where the user is asked to authenticate.

• ACCESS_TOKEN_URL - Provider endpoint where client exchanges the authorization code for tokens.

• USERINFO_URL - Provder endpoint where client sends requests for identity claims.

• KEYCLOAK_BASE_URL - The base URL of the Keycloak instance. Used for generating the

• KEYCLOAK_REALM_NAME - The Keycloak realm that the OpenID Connect client exists in.

To login via the Keycloak client, open http://od.odl.local:8063/login/ol-oidc in your browser.

Additional details can be found at https://docs.google.com/document/d/17tJ-C2EwWoSpJWZKjuhMVgsqGtyPH0IN9KakXvSKU0M/edit

Configuring PostHog Support

The system can use PostHog to evaluate feature flags and record views for the Learning Resource drawer.

The following environment variables must be set for this support to work:

• POSTHOG_PROJECT_ID - int, the project ID for the app in PostHog
• POSTHOG_PROJECT_API_KEY - string, the project API key for the app in PostHog. This usually starts with phc_.
• POSTHOG_PERSONAL_API_KEY - string, your personal API key for PostHog. This usually starts with phx_.

The keys and ID can be found in the Settings section of the project in PostHog that you're using for the app. The project key and ID are under "Project", and you can generate a personal API key under "User"->"Personal API Keys".

Warning

Be careful with the API keys! The project API key is not secret and is sent in clear text with the frontend. The personal API key is secret. Don't mix them up.

Personal API keys only need read permission to Query. When creating a personal API key, choose "Read" under Query for Scopes. The key needs no other permissions (unless you need them for other things). Additionally, if you select either option besides "All-access" under "Organization & project access", make sure you assign the correct project/org to the API key.

Once these are set (and you've restarted the app), you should see events flowing into the PostHog dashboard.

Exported Components

A Javascript bundle of exported frontend components can be generated for use in external websites that have CORS allowance into a given instance of mit-open. There are a few settings you might want to change in order to get the expected results.

• MITOPEN_AXIOS_WITH_CREDENTIALS - This sets withCredentials: true when initializing the Axios API, which tells the end user's browser to send along any browser level cookies for the current domain when making CORS requests
• MITOPEN_AXIOS_BASE_PATH - This sets the base path used for API requests, which will need to be set to a fully qualified url pointing to an instance of mit-open (i.e. https://mitopen.odl.mit.edu) in order for requests from the external site to reach the proper destination
• CORS_ALLOWED_ORIGINS, CSRF_TRUSTED_ORIGINS - On the instance of mit-open that the externally hosted components will access via the API, the domains of any sites that need CORS access need to be here as a list of strings

To build the bundle of exported components, run:

yarn workspace mit-open build-exports

The bundle will build out to frontends/mit-open/build-exports/

initMitOpenDom

This function takes an argument of an HTMLElement with which mit-open components will mount into.

openAddToUserListDialog

This function opens a modal for adding a given LearningResource to a UserList, given the readable_id of the LearningResource object. Given a div with an ID of mit-open-components and a button with the ID for add-to-user-list-button, you would use it in combination with initMitOpenDom like this:

import { initMitOpenDom, openAddToUserListDialog } from "mit-open-components"

$("#add-to-user-list-button").on("click", async (event) => {
  event.preventDefault()
  await initMitOpenDom($("#mit-open-components"))
  await openAddToUserListDialog("18.700+fall_2013")
})

This is just an example, and you could input any readable_id to bring up a dialog to add any given LearningResource object to a UserList.

GitHub Pages

A static site for this repo with developer resources publishes to https://mitodl.github.io/mit-open/ during CI runs.