Sandbox

General plugins (Local) ::: local_sandbox
Maintained by Logo "Moodle an Hochschulen e.V."Moodle an Hochschulen e.V., Alexander Bias
Moodle plugin which programatically restores courses to predefined course states. It can be used to provide playground moodle courses which will be cleaned periodically.
Latest release:
300 sites
608 downloads
53 fans
Current versions available: 23

Providing sandbox courses to your users makes sense for simplifying live training courses or for letting new Moodle users explore the features of Moodle. However, manually resetting sandbox courses after a live training session or after a certain amount of time is a daunting task.

If you want to get rid of this senseless job of resetting courses periodically manually, this plugin is for you.

Please see README file for details about the usage and features of this plugin.

No support in the comments section on this page

Please note that we don't provide any support for this plugin in the comments section on this page.

We appreciate your commendation and reviews for this plugin in the comments. For bug reports and support requests, please read the extensive information in the plugin's README file first and create, if needed, a ticket in the bug tracker which is linked below.

Thanks for your cooperation.

Screenshots

Screenshot #0

Contributors

Logo "Moodle an Hochschulen e.V."
Moodle an Hochschulen e.V. (Lead maintainer): Maintainer
Alexander Bias: Maintainer
Ulm University: Initial Maintainer
Kathrin Osswald: Former Developer
Please login to view contributors details and/or to contact them

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  • Michael Milette
    Tue, 29 Sep 2015, 10:30 PM
    Hi Sebastien,

    > If so, is there a way to have moodle's course backup automatically be stored there?

    Give Moosh a try. It's a command line tool and one of its functions, course-backup, allows you to specify the location where you want the backup file to be saved as well as the file name.

    For more information, see http://moosh-online.com/commands/#course-backup

    Best regards,

    Michael
  • Jon Bolton
    Wed, 18 Nov 2015, 8:18 PM
    Thanks for this plugin! Is there a way to force the course ID to be the same as my 'original' sandbox course (happy to change code) - two reasons:
    1. my sandbox is hardcoded into menus, so when the course id changes, the link breaks sad
    2. the sandbox will reset every day, so my course ID number is going to increment very rapidly.

    Obviously, the second is not a huge issue, but the first is quite important.

    The course ID seems to in classes/task/restore_courses.php - I tried...

    $newcourseid = $oldcourseid;

    and

    $newcourseid = '19';

    at the start of the // Create new course section, but neither option works.

    Any advice?
  • Alexander Bias
    Wed, 18 Nov 2015, 8:33 PM
    Jon,

    I can't do anything about 2., that's just how the plugin works at the moment.

    But for 1., you can change your hardcoded link form https://yourmoodle.com/course/view.php?id=1234 to https://yourmoodle.com/course/view.php?name=courseshortname. As the course's shortname will be kept for the resetted course, this link will continue to work. And you don't have to hack the plugin ;)

    Alex
  • Jon Bolton
    Wed, 18 Nov 2015, 9:00 PM
    Oh yeh, why didn't I think of that! Doh!
    Thanks smile
  • james aco
    Mon, 28 Mar 2016, 6:40 PM
    Hello,
    Testing the plugin with:
    moodle 3.03.
    v3.0-r2 (2016021000)
    /var/www/clients/client1/web1/private/moodledata/sandbox - (permission: -R 777)
    getting email sandbox notification :
    1 NOTICE: Sandbox has restored 0 courses
    1 WARNING: There is no existing course with shortname "demo_lms", skipping
    file...
    backupfile name - backup-moodle2-course-6-demo_lms-20160328-1326.mbz
    sandbox backup file "demo_lms.mbz"
    what i'm doing wrong?
    Thank you
  • Alexander Bias
    Tue, 29 Mar 2016, 3:31 AM
    James,

    based on your posted message, local_sandbox is looking for a course which has a shortname called "demo_lms" which it can reset to the state saved in demo_lms.mbz. If such a course does not exist, you can either change the shortname of the course you want to reset to "demo_lms" or you can rename demo_lms.mbz to the shortname of the course you want to reset.

    Alex
  • Matt Polaniecki
    Wed, 25 May 2016, 3:53 AM
    Is this the plugin that is in effect on demo.moodle.net to reset the course every hour?

    Thanks!
  • Alexander Bias
    Wed, 25 May 2016, 4:00 AM
    Hi Matt,

    no, it isn't.
  • Majid Hussain
    Tue, 28 Jun 2016, 11:40 PM
    Hello. I've just installed this plugin on my Moodle 3.1 and have noticed that new courses are being created instead of existing courses being reset. Instead of resetting the existing courses, the plugin seems to be deleting the existing course and creating a new one. I know this because the restored course has a new course ID. Not sure if I have set this up correctly. Any advice will be much appreciated.
  • Alexander Bias
    Wed, 29 Jun 2016, 2:44 AM
    Hi Abdul,

    you're right, that's just how the plugin works at the moment. This topic has been discussed before in this comment seciton here, please have a look at the other comments - especially from Jon Bolton - if you like.

    Thanks,
    Alex
  • Majid Hussain
    Thu, 30 Jun 2016, 12:50 AM
    Thanks for the suggestion Alex!
  • Sanjeet Chand
    Wed, 11 Jan 2017, 1:21 AM
    Hi Alexander,

    This is a nice plugin, I was wondering if it is possible to choose which courses are restored at what time. For example, only restore some courses weekly and some on a monthly basis if it is possible.

    Thank you.
    Sanjeet
  • Alexander Bias
    Wed, 11 Jan 2017, 4:02 AM
    Hi Sanjeet,

    thanks for your proposal.

    Your proposal is feasible, I would imagine to let the admin add a schedule for every course backup file like he can configure scheduled tasks in Moodle core. However, we don't have any need for this feature at Ulm University and thus don't have resources to implement it.

    If you are a developer or have an experienced developer near you, I would be happy to discuss possible implementations with you on https://github.com/moodleuulm/moodle-local_sandbox/issues and get a pull request from you on https://github.com/moodleuulm/moodle-local_sandbox/pulls.

    Thanks for understanding,
    Alex
  • Yannick Vrolant
    Fri, 28 Feb 2020, 8:43 PM
    Hi, I am wondering : when the course is reseted, does the plugin suppress all data like a reinitiliazition would ? (e.g. answers to tests ; forum posts and so on...). Thanks ! smile

    Yannick
  • Warda Bukhari
    Tue, 25 Oct 2022, 2:53 PM
    Hi,
    Having made a backup of a course and having downloaded the back up file, I decided to restore through sandbox plugin on the same site. I have installed sandbox plugin and try to upload backup file after some time the upload stops/fails with "error connecting to the server".
    Any ideas why this is happening?

    Regards,
    Warda Bukhari
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