Discourse Open edX SSO Connector

Note: This is still in beta, please use with cautious.

This was tested on the following: Discourse: 2.9.0 Open edX: Nutmeg tutor: 14.0.1

The purpose of this project is exactly the following:

You are using Open edX and you want to use discourse.org as place where learners and teachers can communicate. But you don't want the users to have two accounts, for the open edx and discourse forum

By using this plugin, you can let your Open edX utilize, the SSO (single-sign-on) of discourse, thus when users access the forum they will be redirected to the LMS to authticate, and then redirect back the forum if success.

Set up in Open edX

Intalling

Just like any other open edx plugin app, you would just need install by running pip install discourse-openedx-sso in the LMS python env.

Configuration

There are two main settings, this plugins needs, one is required and the other is optional.

DISCOURSE_SECRET: is required and should be at least 10 characters, and it should match the secret in discourse settings. DISCOURSE_VALIDATE_EMAIL: is not required by deafult its False, settings this to True implies validting email address for users, it setted to False because its expected users where already validated through Open edX. The settings is added in lms, e.g either common or production.

DISCOURSE_SECRET = 'my_discourse_secret'
DISCOURSE_VALIDATE_EMAIL = False # By deafult its False.

Example configuration and setup with tutor:

Tip, if you are using tutor you could set these settings as well as installing by creating a plugins file:

Create a file with the following name/path: "$(tutor plugins printroot)"/discourse_sso.py

Content of the file:

from tutor import hooks 
hooks.Filters.ENV_PATCHES.add_items([
    (
        "openedx-lms-common-settings",
        """
DISCOURSE_SECRET = "my_discourse_secret"
"""
    ),
    (
        "openedx-dockerfile-post-python-requirements",
        """
RUN pip install git+https://github.com/zaatdev/discourse-openedx-sso
"""
    ),
])

tutor config plugins enable sso # to enable the plugin tutor config save # to reneder template Note: I really recommend to debug that tutor plugin is applied (because building the docker image takes a lot of time): If you run cd "$(tutor config printroot)"/env && grep -r discourse "$(tutor config printroot)"/env after following the above steps, you should get something like:

apps/openedx/settings/lms/production.py:DISCOURSE_SECRET = "my_discourse_secret"
apps/openedx/settings/lms/development.py:DISCOURSE_SECRET = "my_discourse_secret"
build/openedx/Dockerfile:RUN pip install discourse-openedx-sso

tutor images build openedx # Is needed so the plugin is installed in tutor openedx docker image.

How to set it up in discourse

• Go to the site admin settings, and then choose login tab and
• set the discourse connect url to be: https://yourlms.com/discourseconnect/start Note if you are using tutor dev it would exactly http://local.overhang.io/discourse/start
• Set discourse connect secret at least 10 chractser e.g. my_discourse_secret Note: need to use for following steps.
• check enable discourse connect checkbox, But before:

Important: Make sure the email SMTP service is working in discourse, so that in case of trouble you can still login as an admin.

For more information, check this post on meta.discourse.org

Similar projects

• To connect wordpress with discourse https://wordpress.org/plugins/wp-discourse/