I’ve spent a lot of time working with Git submodules as a part of my journey in systems admin. They have been a key tool for me in improving my upgrade and deployment strategies for Moodle by making the process faster, less prone to error, and more secure. Meaning, there is less downtime and less risk when I do upgrades. All it takes to update all my site plugins is:
sudo git submodule update –remote
Anyway, the above is my justification for working with submodules. But there are struggles sometimes. They work great with 98% of Moodle plugins, as most plugins are published in publicly accessible Github repositories. However, there are those cases where a plugin is not published publicly — usually a premium plugin that is only available to download directly from a vendor website. When I need to use these, I just make a git repository in the plugin folder on my local computer and push to a private repository I can add to my project as a submodule. When a new version comes out, I swap in the new code in the folder, commit and push changes, and am good to go.
So the thorn in my side are the Kaltura plugins. UP uses Kaltura for video and they have a very extensive and robust set of Moodle plugins. My problem is, they host all 10(!) plugins in a single Github repository. The plugins are all in subdirectories as if they were installed in the root directory of a Moodle site, like mod/kalvidassign. That makes it impossible to track them as submodules. I’ve opened a Github issue to see if they would change this but I doubt they will, so I need to rely on the manual method of creating private repos for each one. When an update comes out, that means an annoying, repetitive process of copying new files into folders, and then adding, committing, and pushing ten git repos. No thank you!
I thought this would be a good chance to improve my bash scripting skills. I know the basic programming/scripting techniques but am not very experienced writing in bash. So I did a little research and came up with the script below. Now my process to update the Kaltura plugins in my repo is:
- Download and unzip the new version (a single folder that contains all the updated code)
- Move that folder into the root of my existing local Kaltura plugins repository
- Run my gitcomitter script
The script does the following:
- asks for the name of the folder containing the updated code
- asks for a commit message
- iterates through each plugin directory and copies over the new code, adds and commits changes, and pushes to the remote repo.
#!/bin/bash
#
# this helper script will go into each plugin directory and add/commit/push any changes
# (assuming you have initialized git repos and set up remotes in them)
# use from the root of the Kaltura plugins folder
# copy in the updated code folder and run this script
#get the name of the folder with the updated plugin code
read -p "Directory of of updated code: " updatedir
#get a commit message
read -p "Commit description: " desc
#create array of plugin paths
MODPATHS[0]='blocks/kalturamediagallery'
MODPATHS[1]='filter/kaltura'
MODPATHS[2]='lib/editor/atto/plugins/kalturamedia'
MODPATHS[3]='lib/editor/tinymce/plugins/kalturamedia'
MODPATHS[4]='local/kaltura'
MODPATHS[5]='local/kalturamediagallery'
MODPATHS[6]='local/mymedia'
MODPATHS[7]='mod/kalvidassign'
MODPATHS[8]='mod/kalvidpres'
MODPATHS[9]='mod/kalvidres'
#loop through array, copy over new files, and do git stuff
for i in ${MODPATHS[@]}
do
cp -r $updatedir/$i/* $i
( cd $i && git add . && git add -u && git commit -m "$desc" && git push )
done
#delete the update folder, we don't need it anymore
rm -r updatedir
Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash
