Experimental MFE extensions plugin for Tutor

This plugin is meant to be a collection of experimental changes to the tutor-mfe configuration. At the moment, it will be the testing ground for CDN support for MFEs.

Compatibility Table

Open edX release	Tutor version	Tutor MFE Version	Plugin release
Nutmeg	>=14.0, <15	edunext/[email protected]	14.x.x
Olive	>=15.0, <16	edunext/[email protected]	15.x.x
Palm	>=16.0, <17	edunext/[email protected]	16.x.x
Quince	>=17.0, <18	openedx/[email protected]	17.x.x
Redwood	>=18.0, <19	tutor-mfe>17	18.x.x

Installation

pip install git+https://github.com/edunext/[email protected]

Plugin Configuration

• MFE_EXTENSIONS_CDN_URL (default: "") - The URL of your CDN (e.g https://d1234abcd.cloudfront.net/)
• MFE_EXTENSIONS_BY_PATH (default: True) - When enabled will add additional routes to caddy to enable routing each mfe through a path of the LMS (e.g. https://{LMS_HOST}/learning).

CDN Support

The current deployment of tutor-mfe relies on a webserver (caddy) to serve the MFE static files directly from a Docker container. To reduce the amount of IO the server is incurring while serving a high amount of traffic, we use a CDN to cache the javascript/css bundles of each MFE and simply serve a small index.html file through caddy.

We use webpack's output.publicPath to accomplish this. An important fix to make use of this was merged in fronted-platform v5.5.1, so it's a prerequisite that your MFEs come with this version installed. This is the case for all the MFEs supported by default by Tutor from Quince on-wards.

Building Caveats

The value of publicPath is fixed at build time, therefore it's not possible to reuse the MFE docker image if we set it's value to a specific CDN endpoint. To avoid this limitation we use a script docker-entrypoint.sh to dinamically change a placeholder value used in publicPath each time the container is started.

Once you enable the plugin you can build an image with a "dynamic" publicPath. By default the placeholder will be replaced by an empty string, which was the original value. In a Kubernetes environment it will be replaced with the value of MFE_EXTENSIONS_CDN_URL.

Hosting by Path

This plugin adds additional routes to caddy that allows you to serve any MFE defined by using the MFE_APP_ variables through the LMS domain using the path: https://{LMS_HOST}/{{MFE_CUSTOM_MFE_APP.name}} where name corresponds to the key of each item in the CORE_MFE_APPS dict.

This is done by using the patch {{ patch("caddyfile-mfe-by-path") }} this patch will add a caddy snippet that will route /{{MFE_CUSTOM_MFE_APP.name}} to the MFE container, by adding this patch to the caddyfile-lms patch we can serve the MFE apps through the LMS domain.

There are several reason why you may want to serve the MFEs through LMS paths instead of subdomains, the main one is to enable multisite support: instead of using a single global configuration you can have per-site configuration relying on the MFE Config API, each MFE can retrieve the configuration of their corresponding LMS site simply by defaulting to their base domain.

To enable the snippets in your caddy routes make sure MFE_EXTENSIONS_BY_PATH is set to True (the default) and if you are using an additional caddy patch to enable additional routes you can include the caddyfile-mfe-by-path patch to your block:

    # caddyfile patch
    {$default_site_port} {
        @favicon_matcher {
            path_regexp ^/favicon.ico$
        }
        rewrite @favicon_matcher /theming/asset/images/favicon.ico

        {{ patch("caddyfile-mfe-by-path")|indent(4) }} # Adding this line will include the routes for each MFE.

        # Limit profile image upload size
        request_body /api/profile_images/*/*/upload {
            max_size 1MB
        }
        request_body {
            max_size 4MB
        }
        import proxy "lms:8000"

    }

License

This software is licensed under the terms of the AGPLv3.