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Open Education Builder

This project's goal is to provide a simple, yet powerful way to reorganize, transform and output Open Educational Resources in various formats, regardless of the original structure.

Installation and usage​

The project is built with Docker usage in mind, but it can also be run outside of Docker for local development.

Local install​

This project uses Poetry for dependency management. To install Poetry follow the instructions here.

Once Poetry is installed, clone this repo and run poetry install to install the dependencies.

git clone https://github.com/open-education-hub/openedu-builder
cd openedu-builder
poetry install

To start using the builder run poetry shell to activate the virtual environment and get access to the oe_builder command.

To install the builder as a command line tool, run the following commands:

poetry build
pip install dist/*.whl

If the output of your build is a static website you can use a Python server

python3 -m http.server 8080

then visit http://localhost:8080 to view your content.

Docker container​

You can build the container using the included Dockerfile, or you can pull the published images using the following command:

docker pull ghcr.io/open-education-hub/openedu-builder:latest

Note that the container only contains the builder, and not the dependencies for the plugins. The intended usecase is to build a Docker container on top of the builder container, and install the required dependencies as to not have a huge container.

Details about this can be found in the full documentation.

Architecture​

The structure of the builder is very simple. The main thing a user needs to worry about is the configuration file. The configuration file is in the YAML format, should be placed at the root of your project, and should be named config.yaml.

It contains a few general options, and a list of tasks to run. Each task is represented by a plugin.

A sample configuration file can be seen below:

stages:
  - make_assets
  - embed_reveal
  - docusaurus

output_type: last
build_dir: /build
output_dir: /output

make_assets:
  plugin: command
  options:
    command: make
    locations:
      - content/chapters/compute/lecture
    args:
      - all

embed_reveal:
  plugin: reveal_embed
  options:
    target: docusaurus
    extension: mdx
    build:
      Compute: Compute

docusaurus:
  plugin: docusaurus
  options:
    course_name: Example Course
    sidebar: js
    structure:
      - Lecture:
        - Compute:
            name: Compute
            location: /build/embed_reveal/Compute
      - Lab:
        - Compute:
            location: content/chapters/compute/lab
            name: README
    static_assets:
      - Compute: /build/make_assets/content/chapters/compute/lecture/_site
    config_meta:
      title: Operating Systems
      url: http://localhost/
      baseUrl: /
      onBrokenLinks: warn
      onBrokenMarkdownLinks: warn

Plugins​

Plugins are the main building blocks of the builder. They are responsible for transforming the content step by step into the final output. The builder comes with a few plugins, but it is also recommended and encouraged to contribute your own plugins.

Plugins are written in Python, and should be placed in the plugins directory. They are simple classes that perform a specific task, having a set of predefined options (input and output directories), and a varying set of plugin specific options.

To find out what a plugin does, what options it has, and how to use it, you can check the full documentation.