2022-10-19 DevEnv Meeting Notes

Updates

All

Becca:

• still doing event bus on Tutor

• something went wonky (created better strategies with static images)

• Tutor does not solve slow asset build (a dev pain point)

Connor:
• Paired with Kyle on mount plugin

• We have steps for an MVP as well as a fancier version using compose.tmp instead of JSON

Maybe as soon as the end of the month!
• working on annoying security ticket with Tutor!



Zach:
• Busy on other things

• Using Tutor day to day

• Writing docs

• Eventually hoping to get existing plugin (that’s on a branch) merged into devenv-wg

Jeremy:

• Development environment vision doc (see below)

• Currently an internal 2U doc, hoping to broaden it out once we’re more aligned

Kyle:

• See: demo

• Regis is back to working on Tutor so if it suddenly gets better rejoice

• Working on jobs framework so plugins can add commands in containers

• Olive is currently eating up a lot of time and attention

Development environment first principles

@Jeremy Bowman (Deactivated)

Working on a doc to solidify what we’re trying to accomplish with our development environment, to guide specific technology choices and improvements prioritization.

Notes:

Every time we start talking about DevEnv related things, there’s a lot of confusion about where we are, what are the priorities, who is doing what, and what do we actually want

Fleshing out the existing doc that has some goals briefly stated using info from talking to others

If we have reasonable consensus on ^, we can get more technical

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1DH780mleWGEksGc18LwNLkp_oFmeUiOEyppw-USsbjQ/edit#

Folks can add comments to the doc or on the DevEnv thread

Quickdev! It’s like dev, but quicker

@Kyle McCormick

Plugin:

• implementation: https://github.com/kdmccormick/tutor-contrib-kdmccormick/blob/master/tutorkdmccormick/quickdev.py

• installation: use instructions in https://github.com/kdmccormick/tutor-contrib-kdmccormick

• warnings: no docs yet. will write them soon though.

Goal: improve basic edx-platform development

Tool: Docker named volumes

Hoping to propose this plugin to be merged into Tutor core

Problem: Using one’s own copy of edx-platform means installing requirements, doing scary npm/paver things, and messing it up can mean everything is terrible. Also have to store local copies of any plugins in development deep in your Tutor config folder

Why? Edx-platform’s setup.py needs to be run in order for plugins to be used. This creates a .egg-info file that’s within the repository (overwriting what Tutor had in there). Same with npm_modules and the static folders.

Named volume: something that is stored by Docker outside of containers that sticks around between container restarts

The plugin uses named volumes to store npm_modules and static assets when they were populated from the Docker image

Also automatically mounts prefixed-plugins/xblocks to the right place