Richie, a FUN CMS for Open edX

Overview

Open edX is a great tool for authoring (Studio), hosting and playing (LMS) interactive online courses and MOOCs.

However, if you need to build a complete website with flexible content to aggregate your courses, in several languages and from different sources, you will soon need a CMS.

For example, the edx.org website is built on Drupal for content pages and on edX course discovery for the catalog.

At "France Université Numérique", we wanted to build a similar portal but with Python and Django. That's why we built Richie on top of DjangoCMS, one of the best CMS on the market, as a toolbox to easily create full fledged websites with a catalog of online courses.

Among the features that Richie offers out of the box:

multi-site and multi-lingual by default,
advanced access rights and moderation,
catalog of courses synchronized with one or more Open edX instances,
search engine based on Elasticsearch and pre-configured to offer full-text queries, multi-facetting, auto-complete,...
flexible custom pages for courses, organizations, subjects, teachers (and their inter-relations),
Extensible with any third-party DjangoCMS plugin or any third-party Django application.

Architecture

Richie is a container-native application but can also be installed on your machine.

For development, the project is defined using a docker-compose file and consists of 4 services:

db: the Postgresql database,
elasticsearch: the search engine,
app: the actual DjangoCMS project with all our application code,
node: used for front-end related tasks, i.e. transpiling TypeScript sources, bundling them into a JS package, and building the CSS files from Sass sources.

We provide alternative Docker Compose configurations for test, CI and production, but the application can also be run with your favorite orchestrator. At "France Université Numérique", we deploy our applications on OpenShift using Arnold.

Getting started

First, make sure you have a recent version of Docker and Docker Compose installed on your laptop:

$ docker -v
  Docker version 1.13.1, build 092cba3

$ docker-compose --version
  docker-compose version 1.17.1, build 6d101fb

⚠️ You may need to run the following commands with sudo but this can be avoided by assigning your user to the docker group.

The easiest way to start working on the project is to use our Makefile:

$ make bootstrap

This command builds the app container, installs front-end and back-end dependencies, builds the front-end application and styles, and performs database migrations. It's a good idea to use this command each time you are pulling code from the project repository to avoid dependency-related or migration-related issues.

Now that your Docker services are ready to be used, start the full CMS by running:

$ make run

You should be able to view the site at localhost:8070

Once the CMS is up and running, you can create a superuser account:

$ make superuser

You can create a basic demo site by running:

$ make demo-site

Note that if you don't create the demo site and start from a blank CMS, you will get some errors requesting you to create some required root pages. So it is easier as a first approach to test the CMS with the demo site.

Contributing

This project is intended to be community-driven, so please, do not hesitate to get in touch if you have any question related to our implementation or design decisions.

We try to raise our code quality standards and expect contributors to follow the recommandations from our handbook.

Checking your code

We use strict flake8, pylint, isort and black linters to check the validity of our backend code:

$ make lint-back

We use strict tslint and prettier to check the validity of our frontend code:

$ make lint-front

Running tests

On the backend, we use pytest to run our test suite:

$ make test-back

On the frontend, we use karma to run our test suite:

$ make test-front

Running migrations

The first time you start the project with make bootstrap, the db container automatically creates a fresh database named richie and performs database migrations. Each time a new database migration is added to the code, you can synchronize the database schema by running:

$ make migrate

Handling new dependencies

Each time you add new front-end or back-end dependencies, you will need to rebuild the application. We recommend to use:

$ make bootstrap

To go further

To see all available commands, run:

$ make

We also provide shortcuts for docker-compose commands as sugar scripts in the bin/ directory:

bin
├── exec
├── pylint
├── pytest
└── run

More details and tips & tricks can be found in our development with Docker documentation

License

This work is released under the MIT License (see LICENSE).

cequn/richie