Kolibri server installer source for Debian

This package automates the configuration of a local web server setup to optimize Kolibri for several clients.

It configures and starts Nginx & UWSGI to work together with Kolibri, so caching of static assets is done and use of multicore architecture most servers have is activated when possible.

Building and developing

To fetch and build a new version of this package, the following workflow is suggested:

1. Install the kolibri-proposed development PPA
2. Enable source repositories in /etc/apt/sources.list.d/learningequality-ubuntu-kolibri-proposed*
3. Run sudo apt update
4. Fetch the latest source package: apt source kolibri-server
5. Run dch to edit the changelog. If dch is not available, then install: sudo apt install devscripts
6. Make changes in <unpacked-package>/debian and run dpkg-buildpackage in order to test a new build.
7. Copy your changed files in <unpacked-package>/debian to your git checkout
8. Create a PR

You can optimize this workflow according to your own needs.

Changes can be built and released in kolibri-proposed by the Learning Equality Launchpad team.

Working in the repo

You can also make changes in the cloned repository in the following workflow:

1. Make your changes
2. Run dch, carefully noting your release notes.
3. Build the package with make deb
4. Test the package with sudo dpkg -i ../kolibri-server_VERSION.deb
5. If you have further changes, you can keep editing and invoking make dist
6. Finally, commit your changes and open a PR, including your entry in debian/changelog

Releasing

Push new changes to kolibri-proposed and test them there.

To build packages for all current Ubuntu release series:

1. Install Launchpadlib: sudo apt install python-launchpadlib
2. Run ppa-copy-packages.py script to copy the builds for Xenial to all other currently active and supported Ubuntu releases on Launchpad. The script is run from command line with python2 ppa-copy-packages.py. After this, you should be prompted to create an API key for your Launchpad account.
3. When a release in kolibri-proposed should be released as a stable release, use the binary copy function on Launchpad to copy builds from kolibri-proposed.

Overview

This package depends on the main kolibri Debian package, from versions 0.12 and up.

• kolibri.service: The system service provided by the kolibri package is configured such that the built-in web server (HTTP server 'Cherry Py') is disabled. The Kolibri service still runs and is responsible for setting up the initial database, keeping it migrated and for handling all channel downloads as the main background worker daemon. The system service is disabled when installing kolibri-server, but is started by the kolibri-server.init script.
• kolibri-server.service: Starts UWSGI workers. Depends on Nginx running. Intentionally does not depend on kolibri.service as it is disabled.
• kolibri-server.init: Starts kolibri and creates 2 dynamic configuration files to include in the configuration of UWSGI workers and Nginx.

Configuration

You can configure the behavior of the UWSGI workers, by adding .ini files to /etc/kolibri/uwsgi.d/.

You can configure the main Nginx site and overwrite defaults by adding .conf files in to /etc/kolibri/nginx.d/.

Testing

To run a build and installation test, you can use the following command to do so with docker:

docker build --build-arg TARGET_IMAGE=ubuntu:22.04 -f test/Dockerfile --target test .