dave's blog

Not long ago, Mastodon, an open source, federated alternative to the proprietary network-effect wunderkind, Twitter, came out of no where.

A few months back, I posted instructions on deploying Rocket.Chat and Wekan instances (and their mutual dependency, MongoDB) individually. Since then, I've spent some time with Docker Compose, a set of scripts which help you to define, build, and manage a set of Docker containers. Docker Compose is a thing of beauty. This is the way I now deploy Rocket.Chat, Wekan, and MongoDB together.

Our approach to technology here at the OERu is inspired by the UNIX tool philosophy which can be summarised as follows:

"create simple tools that do one job well, and make it easy to combine them to work together"

At the OERu we have two separate instances of market category leading Discourse Forum: one for OER partner and contributor collaborators and the other for learners. These days, online forums are seen as a bit old-school: fuddy-duddy. From my point of view, however, Discourse is "Forum-NG" (a Next Generation forum).

Mautic is an open source marketing automation web application.

Rocket.Chat is a modern, open source messaging application which is functionally similar to a popular (and heavily marketed) proprietary tool called Slack.

(Update 2017-05-24: see an easier way to run Wekan, Rocketchat, and MongoDB) You may not have all of these installed, but if you're running Wekan or Rocket.Chat based on our instructions, you'll also have MongoDB, and the need to keep them all up-to-date to benefit from their rapid development processes (quick bug fixes and new and improved features every few days!).

Wekan is an excellent, easy-to-use "kanban board" project management support tool, suitable for all manner of projects. For those who have used the highly marketed Trello kanban service, Wekan is functionally similar open source alternative that organisations can host and control for themselves. They can also enhance it in whatever ways they are moved to do so. We encourage our partner institutions to consider this path as a way of reducing costs as well as increasing freedom and privacy.

This post describes installing MongoDB (and backing it up and restoring from backup) in a Docker container on an Ubuntu Linux 14.04 virtual machine. (Update: 2017-05-24 we've just published an easier way to run MongoDB and Rocket.Chat and Wekan which depend on it)

The OERu is committed to using free and open source software (FOSS) for all our technical infrastructure to the extent possible. We're doing pretty well in living up to that principle, but there are a few crucial technology areas where we have not yet found a sufficiently usable or mature FOSS option. This post identifies those exceptions, as they stand in September 2016. Despite being grateful to have these proprietary applications available to us, we will replace them with FOSS in each case as soon as a viable option is available!