A Moodle Plugin Repo

Composer-friendly metadata for Moodle plugins that are hosted on moodle.org.

Description

This repo generates metadata that allow projects to pull in Moodle plugins using Composer, rather than downloading them directly from the Moodle Plugins directory. This allows for much better dependency management, including quick installs and updates, all managed via command line.

micaherne/moodle-plugin-repo

Under the hood, this repo uses micaherne/moodle-plugin-repo (with a patch) to generate metadata. That library is rather old and needed an update to function, so we created a fork in CivicActions GitHub and made a Pull Request (which generated the patch https://github.com/micaherne/moodle-plugin-repo/pull/3.patch).

How to Use the Plugin Metadata

To begin, we assume that you are not using the composer.json that is included in the Moodle package. We prefer to manage Moodle as a dependency alongside its plugins, so we need a composer.json external to the docroot that contains Moodle.

In the repositories section of your project's composer.json, add this project's url.

repositories: [
  {
    "type": "composer",
    "url": "https://civicactions.github.io/moodle-plugin-repo"
  }
]

The author of a plugin isn't always obvious. So, to add a plugin from the repo, prefix the plugin's name with the string moodle-plugin-db/. For example:

composer require moodle-plugin-db/mod_customcert:2022112801

Note that Moodle version numbers are not semantic versioning-compatible.

How to Update the Metadata

Plugins update and the metadata can grow stale. Developers with appropriate credentials can update the metadata distributed here. Regenerating metadata will grab the latest plugin information from Moodle.org and put it in a format friendly to Composer.

1. Clone this repo locally.

   git clone git@github.com:CivicActions/moodle-plugin-repo.git my-directory/
   

2. Install dependencies. This adds the micaherne/moodle-plugin-repo library which will do the heavy lifting.

   composer install
   

3. Run our custom script to regenerate the metadata.

   composer moodle-plugin-repo-update
   

4. Commit the new metadata and push it up to the repo.

   git add packages.json
   git commit . -m "Updated metadata [mm/dd/yyyy]"
   git push origin main
   

GitHub Pages will automatically rebuild when main is pushed to.