Release notes for WeBWorK 2.15

This article is under construction. Use the information herein with caution until this message is removed.

                                     WeBWorK                                    
                         Online Homework Delivery System                        
                                  Version 2.15                          

                    Copyright 2000-2019, The WeBWorK Project                    
                              All rights reserved.                              

Details
-------

Prerelease date:  The advanced beta version of webwork and pg 2.15 is anticipated to be released in June 2019.
It is currently (6/1/2019) in the develop branch.

Release date: October 6, 2019 

Big new features: 
1. multilingual support -- all characters will be supported (even emoji for up-to-date support stacks :-) 
  We are looking for a translation coordinator and translators and people to help organizing an international library of problems. 
2. Easier docker installation -- we will improve documentation to allow you to download and spin up a complete webwork site 
  running on your laptop. This makes it easy to test new webwork features and faster for editing questions.

Other features:


Commits: The master branch was modified by 378 commits in merging the webwork-2.15 branch into master.


Github repository:  https://github.com/openwebwork
Modules:    webwork2   pg   ww_install

WeBWorK-2.15-docker_installation_instructions

Some trouble shooting tips

• A useful alias for entering the docker container. Issue it from the webwork2 directory in the place where you have downloaded your webwork repos. (In this case in webwork-docker/webwork2).
  • Put this in your .bashrc file

       alias dockerbash='docker container exec -it webwork2_app_1 bash'

• • or use the command directly to open a bash instance inside the docker container. It is exactly as if you were logging in to the command line of a site running webwork. You will have to navigate to /opt/webwork/webwork2 to find the copy of the files "inside" the site.

• If the password for admin doesn't work for the admin course you can fix it. Using the bash shell provided by dockerbash navigate to the bin directory.
  • cd webwork2/bin
  • wwsh admin ./putadmin

       wwsh - The WeBWorK Shell
       Available objects: $ce (WeBWorK::CourseEnvironment)
                          $db (WeBWorK::DB)
       Available modules: Data::Dumper

       courseID: admin and scriptFile:  ./putadmin
       --------------------------------
       data changed for user admin
       --------------------------------
       done

• • The admin password has been reset to admin.

Advise for connecting WeBWorK up to a remote mysql database using secure communications (ssl).

• These notes are from Henry Agnew at UCDavis who has set WeBWorK up to work with LibreTexts.

The dbi configuration in site.conf now reads:

   # The database dsn is the path to the WeBWorK database which you have created.
   # Unless you have given the database a different name or the database resides on another
   # server you do not need to change this first value.
   # The format is dbi:mysql:[databasename] for databases on the local machine
   # For a remote database the format is dbi:mysql:[databasename]:[hostname]:[port]
   $database_dsn ="dbi:mysql:webwork";
   $database_storage_engine = 'myisam';

For ssl communication Henry used:

   $database_dsn ="dbi:mysql:webwork:webwork-secure-do-user-3930413-0.db.ondigitalocean.com:25060;mysql_ssl=1;mysql_ssl_ca_file=/mnt/c/Users/Henry/Desktop/Perl/ca-certificate.crt"

"The only change that I needed to do was modify the DBI string a bit and remove the parts about client keys. Basically, you can enable ssl support in WeBWorK just by adding mysql_ssl=1;mysql_ssl_ca_file=/path/to/ca-certificate.crt. I think the issue I was having before was bad permissions on the certificate and my inclusion of the client keys which are not necessary.

Here is my working DBI in my webwork configuration: "dbi:mysql:webwork:webwork-secure-do-user-3930413-0.db.ondigitalocean.com:25060;mysql_ssl=1;mysql_ssl_ca_file=/mnt/c/Users/Henry/Desktop/Perl/ca-certificate.crt"

If WeBWorK has a wiki, I would recommend adding this somewhere incase anyone else wants to use an SSL MySQL database. -Henry Agnew"