bavatuesdays

Tim has been on a full-blown roll creating one-click apps for Reclaim Cloud. In just the first few weeks we already have more custom one-click apps in Reclaim Cloud than we created through Installatron for our first few years. It speaks to the power of this new platform for sure, not to mention the seemingly limitless possibilities it provides us to leverage Docker compose files for a whole host of applications will prove a huge boon for the marketplace of apps.

In fact, J.R. Dingwall’s recent post about trying to get the application Adapt Learning authoring tool installed on Reclaim Cloud speaks quite pointedly to the limits and possibilities of this new platform. Let me start with the limits, a lot of us edtechs are not sysadmins, so spinning up your own server, even if in the new fangled Cloud, is not necessarily simple:

Installing the authoring tool requires access to commandline, which I had never used before. Reclaim Cloud makes accesses command line super easy and clear, but like a foreign language, you gotta know what you’re doing. I also discovered that my approach to following instructions is not really the best way. Initially, you need to have four things in place to install adapt authoring: git, node.js, MongoDB, and grunt. That was a big hurdle until I found in the documentation how to check each. So I spun up the environment (selecting node.js, and mongdb) and then spun my wheels trying to figure out how to get git and grunt installed. Doh! Turned out they came with the package.

You can create just about any stack on Reclaim Cloud, but that process assumes certain skills like command line knowledge of Linux environments, how these next generation apps are packaged, not to mention their various relations, etc. I think this could be an environment edtechs become more and more familiar with, but I also understand the hard limits of entry, the need for support, and the time it takes for such specialized learning. SO, on the other side, the limits are real and it is up to us to try and make the tool accessible not only to the sysadmins, but also the folks who want to focus on its use. Here is JR’s second point really resonates with us:

I recall David Wiley’s keynote presentation at OER 18, a talk where he was asked to be provocative. One of the things he mentioned was about the days of compiling his own code, and while open source is very important that it is more important to make tools usable to the widest possible audience (I’m paraphrasing). I think Reclaim has often struck a great balance between providing simple easy to use access to tools and letting them get under the hood. Reclaim Cloud takes it to the next level.

I think this is absolutely spot on. Reclaim Cloud, as we are imagining it, gives the most Mountain Dew addled sysadmin an endless playground of possibility while at the same time providing a space for instructional technologists and designers to play and conceptualize the possibilities of this new environment, while at the same time providing focused community support and help when and where possible to make various technologies heretofore unimaginable just a click away.

Special thanks to JR for taking it to the blog, JR, I really appreciate the time and energy he spent illustrating the challenges and rewards of diving into a whole new paradigm for exploring open source edtech tools.

As I was moving both bavatuesdays and ds106 from a WordPress Cluster setup to a more simplified LEMP-based container, I was running into issues with private and public keys making it hard for me to rsync between containers. I posted my issue to a thread on the Cloud section of the Reclaim Hosting community forum (which will open up tomorrow, and will be where we will be handling support for the open beta period of Reclaim Cloud), and learned a very cool trick, namely that you can mount any one of your containers onto another environment and simply copy over any files you might need. For example, I need to copy the 15 GBs of files in bavatuesdays wp-content over to the new install, but with rsync not working the prospect of downloading and re-uploading seems time consuming and ridiculous.

“But,” to quote Tim in the forum thread

…there may be an easier way, you can just mount your older storage container to the new container like so:

Then you can simply copy files as if both folders are on the same server from /var/www/webroot/old-site to /var/www/webroot/ROOT

And it worked, what’s more we tried it with a database container after I took a dump of the ds106 database, and it was cool to discover you can mount a database container onto an add container to copy files as well.  So, transferring files and data between containers across different application environments is quote simple.

You go to the Config icon in the container you want to mount the other container to:

Create a directory in the /webroot folder, in this example old-site:

The click the gear icon and click on the Mount optin:

After that you will need to choose the container you want to mount, and include the path to the directory you want to have access to:

It happens quite quickly, the few minutes is an exaggeration…

And once it is mounted you can copy or sync files between the old-site folder and the directory you need to copy your files to (in this example /var/www/webroot/ROOT/) and it the copy seamlessly—without the wait.

Just another reason I am loving Reclaim Cloud.