How to write and integrate a custom plugin in tutor

[sagar (Sagar (ManpraX))]

@Dipankar_Dey

1. I see for any particular plugin (say notes), there’s a separate source code GitHub - openedx/edx-notes-api: edx-notes-api and a respective tutor plugin written GitHub - overhangio/tutor-notes: Student notes plugin for Tutor. Am I correct in understanding, that if I try to write my own plugin, I need to create a project using edx-cookiecutters/cookiecutter-django-app at master · openedx/edx-cookiecutters · GitHub and also to write a respective tutor plugin for that using GitHub - overhangio/cookiecutter-tutor-plugin: Cookiecutter for tutor plugins ?

Yes, you need to create project and then write the plugin separately.
Here’s how you can decide what goes where:

1. Project
   • All your functionality goes here.
2. Plugin
   Think of this part like a bridge between your project and your openedx platform. Use this part to
   • Get whatever you might need from your platform to make your project work as a plugin.
   • Configure your platform to make your project to work as a plugin (I find it easier to use patches for this).

This may look complicated at first but this actually gives you freedom to use your project as a standalone app if you want to and it also allows you to use any project in any language to be used as a plugin.

@Dipankar_Dey

2. I’ve a public repo that hosts the django-app that I’ve created. Would it be sufficient to proceed further with that?

Consider another repository for your plugin code.

@Dipankar_Dey

3. 1. I’ve gone through tutor docs that explains hooks and patches. What I understands hooks have options like filters and actions, depending on my needs, if I try to customize like project settings I can use filter and if I need to execute some callback I can do it with actions. Going through the source codes of existing tutor plugins, I found that patches are written for overriding specific template files or am have I incorrectly interpreted that? For prod deployments, which are the files I should override, any single example, if I need to run my custom django-app?

Patch files are meant to add code to files in your platform whatever you put into a patch file will get appended at the bottom of it’s target file. A target file can be Dockerfile, docker-compose, env files, config.yml to name a few. You need to run tutor config save to apply the patches and adding code to these files is not recommended because all your changes will get overwritten if you run tutor local quickstart.

Template files are the files that you use to tell tutor how to setup your project

You can see Template patch catalog to see which patch file will make changes to which file in your platform.

@Dipankar_Dey

4. I saw tutor docs(Plugin indexes — Tutor documentation) say, we can install a plugin enable disable that, for that we need to add my plugin to plugins index (3 options are there, but probably if I would like to add src indicating my git repo where I’ll write the tutor plugin). I can write that plugins.yml file on my computer(/path/to/my/local/index/plugins.yml), and add that yml to plugins index by running - tutor plugins index add /path/to/my/local/index. Now the problem here is my tutor aws image isn’t allowing me for options like - (plugins) index . What shall I do?

One way is to follow these steps from Creating a Tutor plugin tutorial (I recommend you read this thoroughly):
(run tutor plugins printroot to see your root folder for plugins. Any python file in this folder will be treated as a plugin and you don’t even need to reindex)

1. mkdir -p “$(tutor plugins printroot)”
2. touch “$(tutor plugins printroot)/myplugin.py”
3. tutor plugins list
4. tutor plugins enable myplugin

Or, if you don’t want to go this way, check tutor version in your aws image. Plugin indexing was not there in versions <15.

@Dipankar_Dey

5. If I need to interact with the core openedx db from my custom django-app, is it to be done using REST API only?

I don’t have a definite answer to this but I think you can make direct db calls if you get the db configurations from your platform. I’ll post again if I find some more information on it.

I hope this was of some help.