edx-certificates

This is the code we use the generate certificates at edX.

Generate edX certificates

This script will continuously monitor an xqueue queue for the purpose of generating a course certificate for a user.

Generating sample certificates

1. Create a new python virtualenv

mkvirtualenv certificates

2. Clone the certificate repo

git clone git@github.com:edx/edx-certificates

3. Clone the internal certificate repo for templates and private data (optional)

git clone git@github.com:edx/edx-certificates-internal

4. Install the python requirements into the virtualenv

pip install -r edx-certificates/requirements.txt

5. In order to generate sample certificates that are uploaded to S3 you will need access to the verify-test bucket, create a ~/.boto file in your home directory

[Credentials]
aws_access_key_id = *****
aws_secret_access_key = ****

Or for edX use the boto.example in the edx-certificates-interal repo:

cp edx-certificates-internal/boto.example ~/.boto

6. Set an environment variable to point to the internal repo for certificate templates

export CERT_PRIVATE_DIR=/path/to/edx-certificates-internal

7. In the edx-certificates directory generate a sample certificate:

cd edx-certificates
python create_pdfs.py -c some/course/id -n Guido

some/course/id should be a valid course id found in `edx-certificates-internal/cert-data.yml

Overview

This script will continuously monitor a queue for certificate generation, it does the following:

• Connect to the xqueue server
• Pull a single certificate request
• Process the request
• Post a result back to the xqueue server

A global exception handler will catch any error during the certificate generation process and post a result back to the LMS via the xqueue server indicating there was a problem.

optional arguments:
  -h, --help         show this help message and exit
  --aws-id AWS_ID    AWS ID for write access to the S3 bucket
  --aws-key AWS_KEY  AWS KEY for write access to the S3 bucket

Generation overview

Logging:

Logging is setup similar to Django logging, logsettings.py will generate a configuration dict for logging where in a production environment all log messages are sent through rsyslog

Tests:

To run the test suite:

1. Configure your credential information in settings.py. You will need to specify:

    CERT_KEY_ID = # The id for the key which will be used by gpg to sign certificates
    CERT_AWS_ID = # Amazon Web Services ID
    CERT_AWS_KEY = # Amazon Web Services Key
    CERT_BUCKET = # Amazon Web Services S3 bucket name

   It is also acceptable to leave the AWS KEY and ID values as none and instead use .boto file or run this code from a server that has an IAM role that gives it write access to the bucket in the configuration.

2. To run all of the tests from the certificates directory, run:

    nosetests

   Note that this will run tests that will fail unless AWS credentials are setup. To run just the tests for local on-disk publishing run:

    nosetests tests.gen_cert_test:test_cert_gen

Troubleshooting: If tests fail with errors, try running:

pip install -r requirements.txt

to install necessary requirements.

In addition, you must install gpg. See gnugp for instructions.