moodlebox / moodle-tool_moodlebox Goto Github PK

A Moodle plugin providing a GUI to the administration of a MoodleBox

License: GNU General Public License v3.0

PHP 74.85% CSS 1.40% JavaScript 1.80% Shell 4.09% Gherkin 0.84% Python 17.01%

moodle raspberry raspberry-pi raspberrypi moodle-plugin moodlebox administration

moodle-tool_moodlebox's Introduction

MoodleBox Moodle plugin

A Moodle administration plugin providing a GUI to some settings and management of a MoodleBox, a Moodle server installed on a Raspberry Pi.

This plugin enables a Moodle administrator to monitor some hardware settings, to set the date of the MoodleBox, to allow restart and shutdown of the MoodleBox and changing Raspberry Pi passwords using a GUI. After the installation in Moodle, some steps are required to complete on the Raspberry Pi (see below).

Administrators and users with manager role can moreover restart and shutdown the MoodleBox with buttons in the footer of each Moodle page.

The plugin is compatible with Moodle 3.6 or later. A Raspberry Pi model Zero 2 W, 3A+, 3B, 3B+, 4B or 5 is recommended.

Installation

The MoodleBox plugin must be installed in the Moodle tree of the MoodleBox, in the tool folder. Once installed, an new option MoodleBox will be available in Moodle, under Site administration > Server in the Administration block.

To complete the installation, you have to configure some direvent jobs on the MoodleBox.

Install direvent package:
```
sudo apt-get install direvent
```

Add following lines to file /etc/direvent.conf:

# This is the configuration file for direvent. Read
# direvent.conf(5) for more information about how to
# fill this file.

debug 0;

watcher {
  path /var/www/moodle/admin/tool/moodlebox/;
  file .reboot-server;
  event CLOSE_WRITE;
  command "/sbin/shutdown -r now";
}

watcher {
  path /var/www/moodle/admin/tool/moodlebox/;
  file .shutdown-server;
  event CLOSE_WRITE;
  command "/sbin/shutdown -h now";
}

watcher {
  path /var/www/moodle/admin/tool/moodlebox/;
  file .set-server-datetime;
  event CLOSE_WRITE;
  command "/bin/bash /var/www/moodle/admin/tool/moodlebox/.set-server-datetime";
}

watcher {
  path /var/www/moodle/admin/tool/moodlebox/;
  file .newpassword;
  event CLOSE_WRITE;
  command "/bin/bash /var/www/moodle/admin/tool/moodlebox/bin/changepassword.sh";
}

watcher {
  path /var/www/moodle/admin/tool/moodlebox/;
  file .wifisettings;
  event CLOSE_WRITE;
  command "/usr/bin/python3 /var/www/moodle/admin/tool/moodlebox/bin/changewifisettings.py";
}

watcher {
  path /var/www/moodle/admin/tool/moodlebox/;
  file .resize-partition;
  event CLOSE_WRITE;
  command "/bin/bash /var/www/moodle/admin/tool/moodlebox/bin/resizepartition.sh";
}

Copy the following line at the end of file /etc/sudoers.d/020_www-data-nopasswd (create it if it's not here):

www-data ALL=(ALL) NOPASSWD:/sbin/parted /dev/mmcblk0 unit MB print free
www-data ALL=(ALL) NOPASSWD:/usr/bin/vcgencmd

If you use the PiJuice module, you need to install the packages related
```
sudo apt-get install pijuice-base
```
then allow www-data to access I2C:
```
sudo adduser www-data i2c
```
and reboot.

Features

Info about the MoodleBox (kernel version, Raspberry Pi OS version, free space on SD card, CPU load, CPU temperature, CPU frequency, uptime, DHCP clients and more).
Warning when under voltage detected.
GUI to set the MoodleBox date and time.
GUI to set the MoodleBox password.
GUI to set the MoodleBox Wi-Fi settings: SSID and its visibility, regulatory country, channel, password (or remove password) and fixed IP address.
GUI to resize the partition of the SD card of the MoodleBox, when needed.
GUI to restart and shutdown the MoodleBox.

Availability

The code is available at https://github.com/moodlebox/moodle-tool_moodlebox.

Release notes

See Release notes.

Thanks

To Adrian Perez (@adpe), for implementing restart and shutdown buttons in footer.
To Vincent Widmer (@smallhacks), for implementing PiJuice support.
To Visvanath Ratnaweera (@ratnavis), who kindly donated a Raspberry Pi 3A+ and loaned a Raspberry Pi 4 8GB, enabling support of these Raspberry Pi models.

License

All the source code is licensed under GPL 3 or any later version
The documentation is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International.

This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version. This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.

moodle-tool_moodlebox's People

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adpe smallhacks ianamess dasistwas

moodle-tool_moodlebox's Issues

Enable passwordless Wi-Fi access to the AP of the MoodleBox

White page when loading on Moodle 3.2

Shutdown and restart buttons remain active even after Shutdown is clicked

For a better UX, the buttons should be disabled when Shutdown is clicked, and a message could be displayed telling the user that the server is down.

Key of string contains a non valid character

Change the key of this string so that it doesn't contain a "+" char.

$string['rpi3b+'] = 'Raspberry Pi 3 model B+';

Refactor scripts enabling direct execution by user www-data

Idea: get rid of current complicated way to run root-only commands via cron.

How: enable some carefully chosen commands to be run by user www-data using sudo. This involves enabling some commands in /etc/sudoers file, e.g.

www-data ALL=(ALL) NOPASSWD:/usr/sbin/reboot

Enable partition resizing in GUI

Hi Nicolas,
for my workshops I am using my own MoodleBox image. I take your image but I add some Moodle plugins and some Moodle courses to get my workshop setting. I copy this image to some sd cards to use more than only one MoodleBox. And I want to give away my image to my participants so they can start their own MoodleBox with my settings.
To be able to copy the image on all kinds of sd cards I shrinked the partition down to less than 8 GB. I can copy this image to cards with 8, 16 and 32 GB ... or more :-) Yes, it‘s no problem for me to enlarge the partition in Terminal. But most of my participants who want to get their own MoodleBox only can copy the image to the sd card. They can‘t use the Terminal to enlarge the partition size.

What do you think about the following idea. I want to get a button in the MoodleBox plugin which can enlarge the partition size. The button is avalable only when the sd card has some unused space. So also users will be able to copy their own MoodleBox image to a larger sd cards without open the Terminal. Mac users could use ApplePi Baker for backup the MoodleBox card and restore it to a larger one.

Best regards, Ralf

Bundle hidden files

Hidden files needed for full functionalities should be bundled in the plugin, so that the upgrade process works without user intervention.

Impossible to enter SSIDs with less than 8 bytes

Regression added in a6c96f1.

Font problem with Safari and macOS

Hi Nicolas,
I found that I get a font problem with Safari and macOS on the settings page (1). The source code (3) seems to be okay but there is missing an emoji on the settings page. I switched of the font family (2) in a website admin tool to see the result without this setting.
Ralf

Improve Raspberry hardware detection

We should decode revision number to get precise hardware detection.

See https://www.raspberrypi.org/documentation/hardware/raspberrypi/revision-codes/ for reference and https://github.com/AndrewFromMelbourne/raspberry_pi_revision/ for a C++ implementation.

Local plugin is not adequate. Should be an admin plugin

Change table implementation to flexible_table

See e.g. https://github.com/moodle/moodle/blob/master/admin/localplugins.php#L41

Make script more robust by finding the Moodle installation directory

We'd like to remove hard coded paths in scripts, to prevent potential bugs.

Empty Wi-Fi password does not work

Solution: remove possibility to set an empty password.

Simplify styles.css by giving the theme actual control

In recent Moodle versions, plugins are encouraged to let the theme do the most of the styling. Instead of specifying how widgets look like - e.g. the buttons in your case - it is generally better to just specify the CSS classes and let the theme do the job. This works particularly well with bootstrap based themes like Clean or Boost.

Hide section for partition resizing when not needed

Followup of #45. We'll hide the section when the SD card was already resized to its max sized.

Enable changing of Wi-Fi SSID and channel via GUI

This will fix moodlebox/moodlebox#28

Plugin output warnings and errors when not used on Raspberry Pi

We should add a test before running the plugin and output a notice, when not used on a RPi.

Move form definitions in their own file

Declutter main index.php file by placing the forms definition in their own file.

Follow example in moodle file moodle/cohort/upload.php.

Add warning when required configuration is not available on the Raspberry Pi

When somebody installs the plugin without configuring adequately the incron jobs, some functionalities will fail. The idea is here to make UX better, e.g. displaying a warning to the user.

Refactor code using classes instead of local library

This will help good implementation of #34.

See:

Example here: https://github.com/zig-moodle/moodle/tree/b2824dca5573e322713be84d09b828a4c1e370db/blocks/online_users

PHP warning due to direct inclusion of version.php

The index.php directly includes the version.php to be able to later display the release and version information. It throws the following PHP warning:

Warning: Creating default object from empty value in admin/tool/moodlebox/version.php on line 27

To avoid it, please initialize the empty {{$plugin}} object before including the version.php.

Make restart and shutdown buttons more accessible

Idea suggested here: https://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=362704.

Possibilities:

New block plugin, or
Current plugin injects the buttons via JS.

(Issue cloned from: moodlebox/moodlebox#50.)

Make plugin compatible with the Moodle Mobile app

This resource will be useful: https://docs.moodle.org/dev/Moodle_Mobile_Remote_add-ons

Unnecessary calls to exec()

Although in this particular case they all are pretty safe, it is always a bit scary to see Moodle plugins to do any of potentially dangerous calls like exec(). Especially if there is no real reason for them.

For things like exec('awk \'/^Hardware/{print $3}\' /proc/cpuinfo'); or even exec('cat /var/lib/misc/dnsmasq.leases', $leases);, why not to use native PHP commands like file_get_contents().

Similarly, I can't see why there must be exec("touch $reboottriggerfilename"); when there is a PHP wrapper for that http://php.net/manual/en/function.touch.php (by the way, it feels like the path to these triggers could better be explicit).

Was there a special reason why exec() is used instead of the suggested PHP alternatives?

Plugin is not fully compatible with last version of MoodleBox

Last version of MoodleBox changed Moodle installation directory from /var/www/html to /var/www/moodle. This makes the plugin not fully compatible.

Test and validate plugin against Moodle 3.4

Test plugin agains Moodle 3.4 before planned release.

Enable SSID with arbitrary chars

Allow UTF-8 chars in SSID. See #31.

Error in privacy provider prevents privacy registry display

Class provider mis-defined. Should be class provider implements \core_privacy\local\metadata\null_provider instead of class provider implements \core_privacy\metadata\null_provider.

Notice the missing local path element.

Display version and date of MoodleBox image disk

Version of the MoodleBox image after September 2017 provide info file with image version and date. We should display this info in the "System information" table.

Display Wi-Fi settings in "System information" table

Support of RPi 3B+

Add detection of Raspberry Pi 3B+.

Detect correctly other supported Raspberry Pi models

Currently RPi Zero W aren't detected correctly. Blocked by #43.

Fix version number parsing

Fix version number parsing, enabling parsing of beta, alpha, dev and rc versions.

Parsing wifi settings may fail

Using PHP function parse_ini_file() to parse file /etc/hostapd/hostapd.conf is not reliable.

Implement Moodle privacy API

As this plugin doesn't store any personal user data, we just have to add the null_provider().

More info:

Suppression of strings in new version of plugin causes problems with earlier versions

Issue raised by @krauseralf (by email).

Make SSID, channel and regulatory country display more robust

Make the display of the SSID, Wi-Fi channel and regulatory country robust, by asking directly the system (instead of reading the config files).

Fix validation warning about mismatch between required Moodle versions

Warning says:

In your version.php you have specified $plugin->requires = 2015051103, which is earlier than the official release of Moodle 3.1 (2016050400)

Weird way of how checktime.js is included

I don't understand how the checktime() function is supposed to work and why is it loaded this way. Is not the server time passed as the first argument (the one called Y in the JS code)?

I would suggest to turn this into proper AMD module as you use other core modules anyway - please refer to https://docs.moodle.org/dev/Javascript_Modules

Enable SSID with spaces

Allow writing SSID with a space. See also #38.

Enable setting of Wi-Fi regulatory country

Wi-Fi regulatory country is displayed in the plugin page, but can only be changed by editing file /etc/hostapd/hostapd.conf.

Adapt allowed Wi-Fi channels to the regulatory country defined in hostapd.conf

Incomplete description at moodle.org/plugins

The description reads

After the installation in Moodle, some steps are required to complete on the Raspberry Pi (see below).

There is not below and not steps are described there. I assume you wanted to document the cron job watching for the trigger files?

Additionally, the plugin implicitly expects that some kind of Linux is installed on the Raspberry Pi (which even if is the case in 99%, may or may not be always true). That and all other requirements should be properly documented.

Refactor DHCP clients display

Better present the number of DHCP clients.

PHP warnings due to inexistent file

When used on platform without file '/proc/cpuinfo', following warning throwed:

Notice: Undefined offset: 0 in /Data/home/martignonin/html/admin/tool/moodlebox/index.php on line 50
Notice: Undefined offset: 0 in /Data/home/martignonin/html/admin/tool/moodlebox/index.php on line 52

Add help icons

Enhance simplicity of plugin usage by adding help icons with contextual help text.

We'll use e.g.:

echo $OUTPUT->heading_with_help(get_string('systeminfo', 'tool_moodlebox'), 'systeminfo', 'tool_moodlebox');

and/or

$mform->addHelpButton('currentdatetime', 'currentdatetime', 'tool_moodlebox');

Row background in System information table is wrong (section "DHCP clients")

Hi Nicolas,
it's a very small problem. :-)
In the row "DHCP clients" you should have a second column.
The number of clients can be moved into the right column.

Script for Wi-Fi settings breaks config when .wifisettings is empty

Setting default values if no value found will fix this.

language files

Hello Nicolas,
with the new version you added the language files for de and es_mx into the package.

I think this is not a good idea because nobody will be able to change the text strings. A plugin for Moodle should only come with the english text strings. The other strings will come with the language pack. When I add the german language pack de then I get all strings from the official language distribution ... and this language pack also comes with the file moodlebox.php.