Sugarizer School Portal

Sugarizer is the open-source learning platform based on Sugar that began in the famous One Laptop Per Child project.

Sugarizer Server allows the deployment of Sugarizer on a local server, for example on a school server, so expose Sugarizer locally as a Web Application. Sugarizer Server can also be used to provide collaboration features for Sugarizer Application on the network. Sugarizer Server could be deployed in a Docker container or on any computer with Node.js 6+ and MongoDB 2.6+.

Sugarizer School Portal is a new tool in the Sugarizer family which was created as a part of Google Summer of Code 2020 program. It provides a way for schools interested by Sugarizer to host and manage themselves their Sugarizer deployment. It provides an on-demand (SaaS) Sugarizer Server deployment tool so that every school will be able to create a Sugarizer Server to host its own deployment without any technical skill in just a few clicks.

Under the hood, Sugarizer School Portal is a Kubernetes cluster that is able to create/manage on-demand new Sugarizer Server instances.

The Sugarizer School Portal consists of multiple components:

Sugarizer School Portal Server provides a web interface for the Sugarizer School Portal. It provides a role-based authentication for Clients, Moderators and Administrators, where the users can request for deployment by filling a simple form. The users can also monitor their deployment requests. The deployment administrators can monitor the users and approve/reject/deploy the requested deployments. It also allows the users to create admin accounts on their Sugarizer Server deployment directly from the interface

Sugarizer Chart is a collection of Helm Charts for setting up Sugarizer Server deployment on a Kubernetes cluster. You can deploy multiple Sugarizer Server instances by editing the values of the YAML file and running simple helm install command. The Sugarizer Server instances are accessible from the browser by opening the hostName URL. Currently, it supports four providers:

Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS)
Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS)
Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE)
Microk8s (For bare-metal Kubernetes cluster)

The Sugarizer School Portal Server uses Sugarizer Chart to install a deployment in the Sugarizer School Portal Cluster.

Sugarizer School Portal Chart is a Helm Chart for setting up Sugarizer School Portal Server deployment on a Kubernetes cluster. You can deploy Sugarizer School Portal Server instance by editing the values of the YAML file and running simple helm install command. The Sugarizer School Portal Server instance can be accessed from the browser by opening the hostName URL.

The Sugarizer School Portal Server uses nodejs-helm to interact with the Helm process. It is an npm package which is a wrapper that integrates with the helm.sh process. The repository for the project is available on the GitHub as nikhilm98/nodejs-helm.

Setup

The Sugarizer School Portal also contains a set of scripts which can be used to install dependencies, set-up the cluster environment and install the Sugarizer School Portal Chart on your GKE Cluster with a simple sh setup.sh command.

You can read more about the setup process in this documentation.

Backup and Restore data using MGOB

MGOB is a MongoDB backup automation tool built with Go. It features scheduled backups, local backups retention, upload to S3 Object Storage (Minio, AWS, Google Cloud, Azure) and upload to gcloud storage.

To setup MGOB to automate MongoDB backups, follow these instructions:

Obtain Cloud Storage Credentials

If you want to upload the backups on cloud storage then your need to obtain corresponding cloud storage credentials.

For S3, create a S3 bucket and store its credentials in the YAML file.
For azure storage, create an Azure Storage Container and store its credentials in the YAML file.
For gcloud, create a GCloud Bucket and create a Service Account with Storage Permission. Enter the service account and bucket deails in the YAML file.

Note: In case of GCloud storage, you need to enable storage.objects access to the service account in order to allow objects creation in the bucket.

MGOB Installation

Clone the MGOB repository:

git clone https://github.com/stefanprodan/mgob.git
cd mgob/chart

Edit the chart's values.yaml file.

Set the appropriate storageClass for your provider.
Update the mgob-config configMap. Add sugarizer-database backup plan. Here is an example backup plan:

sugarizer-database.yml: |
  target:
    host: "mymongodb-mongodb-replicaset-0.mymongodb-mongodb-replicaset.default,mymongodb-mongodb-replicaset-1.mymongodb-mongodb-replicaset.default,mymongodb-mongodb-replicaset-2.mymongodb-mongodb-replicaset.default"
    port: 27017
    database: ""
  scheduler:
    cron: "0 0,6,12,18 */1 * *"
    retention: 14
    timeout: 60

Add a reference to the secret. You can either insert your secret values as part of helm values or refer externally created secrets. In our case, we created a secret with a name service-acc-secret.

secret:
  - name: service-acc-secret

An example YAML configuration is available as mgob.yaml.

Restoring data from backup

In order to restore data to the Sugarizer School Portal database, you need to open a shell in MGOB pod. The backups are available in /storage/sugarizer-database/ directory inside the pod (where sugarizer-database was the name of our backup plan).

In case of a database error in which you need to completely restore all the databases, you can run:

mongorestore --gzip --archive=/storage/sugarizer-database/sugarizer-database-xxxxxxxxxx.gz --host mymongodb-mongodb-replicaset-0.mymongodb-mongodb-replicaset.default:27017 --drop

In case a school's DB is messed up and you need to restore that, you can run:

mongorestore --gzip --archive=/storage/sugarizer-database/sugarizer-database-xxxxxxxxxx.gz --nsInclude="db_name.*" --host mymongodb-mongodb-replicaset-0.mymongodb-mongodb-replicaset.default:27017 --drop

Where db_name is the name of the database to restore.

Contributing

Pull requests are welcome. For major changes, please open an issue first to discuss what you would like to change.

License

This project is licensed under Apache v2 License. See LICENSE for full license text.

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