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Guideline for Configuration in the Setup

1 Guideline

There are two (at least) different interpretations of what "Administration" might mean in the context of ILIAS. "Administration" could mean the task of making configuration and settings within the various domains of ILIAS, such as configuring RBAC, ILIAS objects such as a Course or services such as the Learning Progress. On the other hand, an "Administrator" could be the one that is in charge of taking care of the hosting environment of the plattform, such as the database and webserver, proxies or other services that are required to run and serve the ILIAS application. Although these two sets of tasks share the same word, the required knowledge, approaches and skill set are vastly different. To untangle these two kinds of "Administration", this guideline uses "ILIAS administrator" for the first kind and "server administrator" for the second kind. Configuration should be distributed along these rules:

• If a configuration contains decisions or fields that can only be known reliably by the server administrator, such as IPs, paths to files on the server or passwords for services on the hosting environment, the configuration MUST be written in the setup only.
• If a configuration contains decisions or fields that require tools or services in the hosting environment which can only be provided by the server administator, such as configuration for PhantomJS, the configuration MUST be writtem in the setup only.
• If a configuration contains decisions or fields that are coupled to the hosting environment or change in response to changes on the hosting environment, such as the URL of the Instance, HTTPs configuration or SMTP configuration, the configuration SHOULD be written in the setup only.

This does not imply, that all configuration of some component of ILIAS needs to be made only in the setup or only inside the installation. On the contrary: It is totally expected that components will have some configuration in the setup and some in the "Administration" inside the installation.

Currently this Guideline only is concerned with the question where a configuration could be written. Dependending on the concrete configuration it might be benefitial to make configuration visible inside the installation, even if the configuration can only be written in the setup (or vice versa), e.g. to improve trouble shooting. This, however, needs to be well balanced with other concerns like security.
 

2 Status

• Effective from release: 7
• Approved by Jour Fixe at: JourFixe-2020-09-14
• Implementation status: partly implemented
• Funding for streamlining existing features: [CaT Concepts and Training GmbH]
  
• Implementation of guideline: all developers

3 Components that are not compliant with the Guideline

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4 Discussion

JourFixe, ILIAS [jourfixe], 03 AUG 2020 : We like this guideline and would like to accept it for ILIAS 7 but keep the request open for another two weeks to check what this guideline has for an impact on actual settings in administration and setup. We don't want to have a strict distinction by components but have only such settings in the setup that require the knowledge of the exact pathes and settings of the server (which is only known by the server administrator). But this information might be provided in the administration as read-only information to improve trouble-shooting and administration by the ILIAS administrators. Features that can only be used when a path on the server is defined should get a notification in the administration that a server administrator needs to do additional configuration. Open issue: how we handle the setting of pathes for software that can point to a local or global server, e.g. MathJax and Open Street Maps.

Samoila, Oliver [oliver.samoila], 17 AUG 2020: Thanks for the initiative. For my institution I can say that although we also have a separation of ILIAS admin and server admin. We often have an interaction where we both at least rely on the layer of configurations from "the other world". I would appreciate to keep at least a readability of the configurations if parts of the configurations are removed from the ILIAS administration.
The configuration of PDF engines, xAPI, ECS is only a minor issue for our server admins. ILIAS administrators are more concerned with this.
Furthermore the documentation of all contents is done by us as ILIAS admins.

JourFixe, ILIAS [jourfixe], 14 SEP 2020: We highly appreciate this guideline and accept it for ILIAS 7.