Installation and deployment

Supported platforms

INGInious is intended to run on Linux (kernel 3.10+), but can also be run on Windows and macOS thanks to the Docker toolbox.

Dependencies setup

INGInious needs:

RHEL/Cent OS 7.0+, Fedora 24+

The previously mentioned dependencies can be installed, for Cent OS 7.0+ :

# curl -fsSL https://get.docker.com/ | sh #This will setup the Docker repo
# yum install -y epel-release https://centos7.iuscommunity.org/ius-release.rpm
# yum install -y git mongodb mongodb-server gcc libtidy python35u python35u-pip python35u-devel zeromq-devel

Or, for Fedora 24+:

# curl -fsSL https://get.docker.com/ | sh #This will setup the Docker repo
# dnf install -y git mongodb mongodb-server gcc libtidy python3 python3-pip python3-devel zeromq-devel

You may also add openldap-devel if you want to use the LDAP auth plugin and xmlsec1-openssl-devel libtool-ltdl-devel for the SAML2 auth plugin.

Danger

Due to compatibility issues, it is recommended to disable SELinux on the target machine.

You can now start and enable the mongod and docker services:

# systemctl start mongod
# systemctl enable mongod
# systemctl start docker
# systemctl enable docker

Ubuntu 16.04+

The previously mentioned dependencies can be installed, for Ubuntu 16.04+:

# curl -fsSL https://get.docker.com/ | sh #This will setup the Docker repo
# apt-get install git mongodb gcc tidy python3 python3-pip python3-dev libzmq-dev

You may also add libldap2-dev libsasl2-dev libssl-dev if you want to use the LDAP auth plugin and libxmlsec1-dev libltdl-dev for the SAML2 auth plugin

You can now start and enable the mongod and docker services:

# systemctl start mongodb
# systemctl enable mongodb
# systemctl start docker
# systemctl enable docker

OS X 10.9+

We use brew to install some packages. Packages are certainly available too via macPorts.

$ brew install mongodb
$ brew install python3

Follow the instruction of brew to enable mongodb.

The next step is to install Docker for Mac.

Windows

Danger

INGInious rely on Docker to run containers. While Docker is supported on Windows 10 (version 1607), INGInious does not provide support for Windows containers yet.

The recommended way to run INGInious under Windows is by using a Linux virtual machine, for much more simplicity. One can also only run the Docker agent under a Linux virtual machine and run the backend and selected frontend under Windows.

In the later case, you’ll need to install Python 3.5+, MongoDB, LibTidy and LibZMQ.

Installing INGInious

The recommended setup is to install INGInious via pip and the master branch of the INGInious git repository. This allows you to use the latest development version. This version is currently the supported one for issues.

$ pip3 install --upgrade git+https://github.com/UCL-INGI/INGInious.git

This will automatically upgrade an existing version.

Note

You may want to enable the LDAP/SAML2 plugin or use (F)CGI instead of the web.py default webserver. In this case, you have to install more packages: simply add [cgi], [ldap] or [saml2] to the above command, depending on your needs:

$ pip3 install --upgrade git+https://github.com/UCL-INGI/INGInious.git#egg=INGInious[cgi,ldap]

Some releases are also published on Pipy. However, no support is provided for these versions now. To install the latest previous release:

$ pip3 install --upgrade inginious

Configuring INGInious

INGInious comes with two frontends:

  • The LTI frontend, which allows to interface with Learning Management System via the LTI specification. Any LMS supporting LTI is compatible. This includes Moodle, edX and Coursera, among many others.
  • The Web App, a mini-LMS made for on-site courses. It provides statistics, group management, and the INGInious studio, that allows to modify and test your tasks directly in your browser.

You can use one, or both. Each of them have to be configured independently. This can be done automatically with the inginious-install CLI. To configure the LTI frontend:

$ inginious-install lti

To configure the Web App frontend:

$ inginious-install webapp

This will help you create the configuration file in the current directory. For manual configuration and details, see Configuration reference.

The detailed inginious-install reference can be found at inginious-install.

Running INGInious

During the configuration step, you were asked to setup either a local or remote backend. In the former case, the frontend will automatically start a local backend and grading agents.

With local backend/agent

To run the frontend(s), please use the inginious-lti or inginious-webapp CLI. This will open a small Python web server and display the url on which it is bind in the console. Some parameters (configuration file, host, port) can be specified. Details are available at inginious-lti and inginious-webapp.

If you use the LTI frontend, you have to add it to your LMS: follow the instructions in Configuring the LTI frontend.

With remote backend/agent

To run INInious with a remote backend (and agents), do as follows:

  1. On the backend host, launch the backend (see inginious-backend) :

    inginious-backend tcp://backend-host:2001 tcp://backend-host:2000

    The agents will connect on tcp://backend-host:2001 and clients on tcp://backend-host:2000

  2. Possibly on different hosts, launch the Docker and MCQ agents (see inginious-agent-docker and inginious-agent-mcq) :

    inginious-agent-docker tcp://backend-host:2001
inginious-agent-mcq tcp://backend-host:2001

  3. In you INGInious frontend configuration file (see Configuration reference), set backend to :

    backend: tcp://backend-host:2000

  4. Run your preferred frontend using inginious-lti or inginious-webapp (or both).

Webterm setup

An optional web terminal can be used with INGInious to load the remote SSH debug session. This rely on an external tool.

To install this tool :

$ git clone https://github.com/UCL-INGI/INGInious-xterm
$ cd INGInious-xterm && npm install

You can then launch the tool by running:

$ npm start bind_hostname bind_port debug_host:debug_ports

This will launch the app on http://bind_hostname:bind_port. The debug_host and debug_ports parameters are the debug paramaters on the local (see Configuration reference) or remote (see inginious-agent-docker) Docker agent.

To make the INGInious frontend aware of that application, update your configuration file by setting the webterm field to http://bind_hostname:bind_port (see Configuration reference).

For more information on this tool, please see INGInious-xterm. Please note that INGInious-xterm must be launched using SSL if the frontend is launched using SSL.

Webserver configuration

Warning

In configurations below, environment variables accessible to the application must be explicitly repeated. If you use a local backend with remote Docker daemon, you may need to set the DOCKER_HOST variable. To know the value to set, start a terminal that has access to the docker daemon (the terminal should be able to run docker info), and write echo $DOCKER_HOST. If it returns nothing, just ignore this comment. It is possible that you may need to do the same for the env variable DOCKER_CERT_PATH and DOCKER_TLS_VERIFY too.

Using lighttpd

In production environments, you can use lighttpd in replacement of the built-in Python server. This guide is made for CentOS 7.x.

Install lighttpd with fastcgi:

# yum install lighttpd lighttpd-fastcgi

Add the lighttpd user in the necessary groups, to allow it to launch new containers and to connect to mongodb:

# usermod -aG docker lighttpd
# usermod -aG mongodb lighttpd

Create a folder for INGInious, for example /var/www/INGInious, and change the directory owner to lighttpd:

# mkdir -p /var/www/INGInious
# chown -R lighttpd:lighthttpd /var/www/INGInious

Put your configuration file in that folder, as well as your tasks, backup, download, and temporary (if local backend) directories (see Configuring INGInious for more details on these folders).

Once this is done, we can configure lighttpd. First, the file /etc/lighttpd/modules.conf, to load these modules:

server.modules = (
    "mod_access",
    "mod_alias"
)

include "conf.d/compress.conf"
include "conf.d/fastcgi.conf"

You can then replace the content of fastcgi.conf with:

server.modules   += ( "mod_fastcgi" )
server.modules   += ( "mod_rewrite" )

alias.url = (
    "/static/webapp/" => "/usr/lib/python3.5/site-packages/inginious/frontend/webapp/static/",
    "/static/common/" => "/usr/lib/python3.5/site-packages/inginious/frontend/common/static/"
)

fastcgi.server = ( "/inginious-webapp" =>
    (( "socket" => "/tmp/fastcgi.socket",
        "bin-path" => "/usr/bin/inginious-webapp",
        "max-procs" => 1,
        "bin-environment" => (
            "INGINIOUS_WEBAPP_HOST" => "0.0.0.0",
            "INGINIOUS_WEBAPP_PORT" => "80",
            "INGINIOUS_WEBAPP_CONFIG" => "/var/www/INGInious/configuration.yaml",
            "REAL_SCRIPT_NAME" => ""
        ),
        "check-local" => "disable"
    ))
)

url.rewrite-once = (
    "^/favicon.ico$" => "/static/common/icons/favicon.ico",
    "^/static/(.*)$" => "/static/$1",
    "^/(.*)$" => "/inginious-webapp/$1"
)

Replace webapp by lti if you want to use the LTI frontend.

The INGINIOUS_WEBAPP or INGINIOUS_LTI (according to your config) prefixed environment variables are used to replace the default command line parameters. See inginious-lti and inginious-webapp for more details.

The REAL_SCRIPT_NAME environment variable must be specified under lighttpd if you plan to access the application from another path than the specified one. In this case, lighttpd forces to set a non-root path /inginious-webapp, while a root access if wanted, in order to serve static files correctly. Therefore, this environment variable is set to an empty string in addition to the rewrite rule.

Finally, start the server:

# systemctl enable lighttpd
# systemctl start lighttpd

Using Apache

You may also want to use Apache. You should install mod_wsgi. WSGI interfaces are supported through inginious-webapp and inginious-lti scripts. This guide is made for CentOS 7.x.

Install the following packages (please note that the Python3.5+ version of mod_wsgi is required):

# yum install httpd httpd-devel
# pip3.5 install mod_wsgi

Add the apache user in the necessary groups, to allow it to launch new containers and to connect to mongodb:

# usermod -aG docker apache
# usermod -aG mongodb apache

Create a folder for INGInious, for example /var/www/INGInious, and change the directory owner to apache:

# mkdir -p /var/www/INGInious
# chown -R apache:apache /var/www/INGInious

Put your configuration file in that folder, as well as your tasks, backup, download, and temporary (if local backend) directories (see Configuring INGInious for more details on these folders).

Set the environment variables used by the INGInious CLI scripts in the Apache service environment file (see lighttpd for more details):

# cat  << EOF >> /etc/sysconfig/httpd
INGINIOUS_WEBAPP_CONFIG="/var/www/INGInious/configuration.yaml"
INGINIOUS_WEBAPP_HOST="0.0.0.0"
INGINIOUS_WEBAPP_PORT="80"
EOF
# rm /etc/httpd/conf.d/welcome.conf

Please note that the service environment file /etc/sysconfig/httpd may differ from your distribution and wether it uses systemd or init.

You can then modify your /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf file to apply the following rules:

LoadModule wsgi_module /usr/lib64/python3.5/site-packages/mod_wsgi/server/mod_wsgi-py35.cpython-35m-x86_64-linux-gnu.so

WSGIScriptAlias / "/usr/bin/inginious-webapp"
WSGIScriptReloading On

Alias /static/common /usr/lib/python3.5/site-packages/inginious/frontend/common/static/
Alias /static/webapp /usr/lib/python3.5/site-packages/inginious/frontend/webapp/static/
Alias /static/lti /usr/lib/python3.5/site-packages/inginious/frontend/lti/static/

<Directory "/usr/bin">
    <Files "inginious-webapp">
        Require all granted
    </Files>
</Directory>

<DirectoryMatch "/usr/lib/python3.5/site-packages/inginious/frontend/(.+)/static/">
    Require all granted
</DirectoryMatch>

Please note that the compiled wsgi module path may differ according to the exact Python version you are running.