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Editing course.conf

Editing course.conf

by Lars Jensen -
Number of replies: 3

Dear Colleagues,

On our system, instructors cannot edit course.conf, but they can edit files in the templates subdirectory. The files in both directories have the same permission level, so I wonder why this is the case...

Is this how it is supposed to be? If so, what is the reason the instructor can't edit course.conf

Sincerely,
Lars.

In reply to Lars Jensen

Re: Editing course.conf

by Arnold Pizer -

Hi Lars,

You have to have "admin" privilege to edit course.conf.  "professor" privilege is not sufficient.  Usually a user with "admin" privilege is added to a course when it is created and that user can give "admin" privilege to any other user.


In reply to Lars Jensen

Re: Editing course.conf

by Alex Jordan -
It's a security matter that only a user with admin status can edit the config files. I believe it's to prevent an instructor who may not know what they are doing from saving the config file in some way that renders the course inoperable (until the config file is edited from the server side).

Arnie mentioned you can either be the admin user in the course or the admin user could level-up the professor. An alternative is to set the following somewhere in the config file chain (localOverrides.conf, course.conf):

$permissionLevels{edit_restricted_files} = "professor";

Maybe it is worth hearing from more people why this might be a bad idea first.
In reply to Alex Jordan

Re: Editing course.conf

by Lars Jensen -

Dear Colleagues,

Thanks for the replies. The reason I ask is that I'm thinking about enabling LTI authentication with Canvas. However this is a global action, so I wanted to allow instructors who don't use Canvas to use webwork too, and I thought that including the line

include("conf/authen_ldap.conf");

in course.conf for any course that is not using Canvas. Is there another easy solution for this situation?

Sincerely,
Lars.