Sakai 11 Install Guides

Demo install

The Sakai demo no longer supports HSQLDB available as of Sakai 11. If you wish to use the demo you will need to download a MySql connector and configure Sakai properties.. Discussions are happening to make an improved demo for the future. See http://farm.apereo.org

Binary install

Sakai 11 Install Binary

Source install

Sakai 11 Install from Source

Sakai 11 ReadMe

Recommend storing files on your file system instead of database

Sakai will store the file content in the database as BLOBs by default. Set this value to change it to store the content on the filesystem instead.

The file system root for content hosting's external stored files (default is null, i.e. store them in the db). 

# bodyPath@org.sakaiproject.content.api.ContentHostingService=/someplace/

# KNL-309 : To enable support for deleted files set this property to some location

# bodyPathDeleted@org.sakaiproject.content.api.ContentHostingService=${sakai.home}db/bodyContentDeleted/

# When storing content hosting's body bits in files, an optional set of folders just within the bodyPath -

# to act as volumes to distribute the files among - a comma separate list of folders.  If left out, no volumes will be used.

# see the readme file (2.2.7 File Based Content Hosting) for more details

# bodyVolumes@org.sakaiproject.content.api.ContentHostingService=vol1,vol2,vol3

# Set to true to enable the release/retract and hiding of resources in ContentHostingService, Default: true

# availabilityChecksEnabled@org.sakaiproject.content.api.ContentHostingService=true

# Set to true to enable custom sorts within folders in ContentHostingService and the Resources tool

# DEFAULT: true

# prioritySortEnabled@org.sakaiproject.content.api.ContentHostingService=true

You might also want to enable the soft deletion feature of Sakai

Soft site deletion. 

If enabled, sites that are deleted will be inaccessible to normal users but won't be deleted immediately, in case they need to be recovered.

You also need to set the gracetime value, in days. After this period, the softly deleted sites will be hard deleted. Defaults to 30 days.

There is a Quartz job that must be configured to run periodically (once per day or so) to expunge those sites.

site.soft.deletion=true (default is false)

 site.soft.deletion.gracetime=30

Lessons management of HTML pages

By default, Lessons uses Content Security Policy headers to restrict what an HTML page can do, when the page is loaded from Sakai.

This is a security tradeoff. There are security risks from opening a web page written by someone else. That page can contain Javascript, which will execute with your own permissions. For this reason, by default Sakai will not open web pages in Resources. If you click on an HTML file there, it will download. We considered this inaccessible for Lessons, since the whole point of Lessons is to present content online. But we still had to deal with the security problem. So the page is served with an HTTP header that causes browsers to open the page in a “sandbox.” This restricts what the page can do.

This is new in 11. In Sakai 10, Lessons would simply open any HTML page specified.

You can restore the Sakai 10 behavior by adding the following to sakai.properties:

lessonbuilder.use-csp-headers=false

The recommended approach for dealing with this security risk is to use Sakai’s content domain support. This causes HTML pages stored in resources to be served from a different hostname than the main Sakai hostname. E.g. if your institution uses sakai.univ.edu, you might use content.sakai.univ.edu for content, resulting in URL such as https://content.sakai.univ.edu/access/content/group ….  Using a separate domain prevents web pages from executing with your Sakai privileges. Thus if you are using a separate content domain, Lessons does not add the Content Security Policy headers.

Note that it is up to the browser to enforce Content Security Policy. Safari, Chrome, and Edge do. Firefox does not. Thus Firefox users are still at risk when opening HTML pages in Lessons. I believe IE 10 and 11 also support it.

Dashboard not included

The Dashboard tool, new for Sakai 11, has not been included in the 11.0 release because too many technical issues existed and not enough person-power to address them in time for the release.

List of Dashboard issues (not included in 11.0) .   

STEP - Delivery Exceptions will be in 11.2 or later

STEP (Samigo Test and Quizzes Enhancement Project) feature to allow different delivery settings for specific sections, groups, and individuals , did not make it into Sakai 11.0 due to issues with the Auto Submit feature and data storage and retrieval issues. We are hoping to have this go into a later 11.x maintenance release.  

A number of other features were delivered as a result of STEP for 11.0 including:

Features on by default in Sakai 10, turned off by default in Sakai 11

Release	Tool/Service	Ticket	Notes

Release	Tool/Service	Ticket	Notes
11.0	Samigo Test and Quizzes	SAK-36933 - Disable Extended Matching Question type VERIFIED	The Extended Matching Question type has been turned off by default. A number of issues have surfaced that need attention. See https://jira.sakaiproject.org/issues/?filter=15806
11.0	Samigo Test and Quizzes	SAK-36643 - Hide assessment templates by default VERIFIED	Assessment Templates are confusing. Once a Template is used, certain settings may be unavailable to the instructor. For this reason Assessment templates have been turned off by default. You can turn it on by setting samigo.showAssessmentTypes= true in sakai.properties.

Features off by default in Sakai 10, turned on by default in Sakai 11

Release	Tool/Service	Ticket	Notes

Release	Tool/Service	Ticket	Notes
11.0	Site	INFRSTR-333 - Authenticate to see issue details	# Allow a specific icon for sites. Should we allow sites to supply a specific icon for their site. # DEFAULT: true # portal.siteicon.allow=false
11.0	Calendar	SAK-31414 - Change the default configuration in sakai 11.0 so that the option for maintainers to subscribe to external calendars is enabled by default VERIFIED	# calendar.external.subscriptions.enable=false
11.0	Calendar	SAK-31413 - Change the default configuration in sakai 11.0 so that the option for users to generate a private URL for a calendar is enabled by default, create an additional property: ical.public.secureurl.subscribe VERIFIED	ical.opaqueurl.subscribe
11.0	Content	SAK-31415 - Change the default configuration in sakai 11.0 so that when a site is deleted it is actually placed into a "recycle bin" - so called "soft deletion" of sites VERIFIED

Highly recommended settings to override default values

Release	Tool/Service	Ticket	Notes

Release	Tool/Service	Ticket	Notes
11.0	HikariCP	SAK-39486 - Add support for HikariCP connection pool RESOLVED	In Oracle 11c, the default maximum number of database connections in the connection pool may be too low for a production server. This setting and others for HikariCP can be configured in kernel/kernel-component/src/main/webapp/WEB-INF/db-components.xml, or overridden in sakai.properties in the form: maximumPoolSize@javax.sql.BaseDataSource=50
11.0	Feedback tool	SAK-31184 - Improvements to the Feedback Tool CLOSED	# ###################################### # SAK-29271 Feedback Tool Properties # ###################################### # Recipient address that will receive the contact emails # feedback.technicalAddress = someaddress@institution.org # Enable/Disable the content panel # DEFAULT: true # feedback.show.content.panel = false # Enable/Disable the help panel # DEFAULT: true # feedback.show.help.panel = false # Enable/Disable the technical panel # DEFAULT: true # feedback.show.technical.panel = false # Enable/Disable the suggestions panel # DEFAULT: true # feedback.show.suggestions.panel = false # Configure the help link destination (Sakai help by default) # feedback.helpPagesUrl = /portal/help/main # Configure the help link target # feedback.helpPagesTarget = _blank # Configure the helpdesk destination # feedback.helpdeskUrl = https://helpdesk.institution.org # Configure the suggestion link destination # feedback.featureSuggestionUrl = https://suggestions.institution.org # Add supplementary information at the right side of the tool # feedback.supplementaryInfo = Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum # Maximum size for the feedback attachments. This value should be lower than content.upload.max value, if it's higher the tool will use content.upload.max value # feedback.attach.max = 10

Significant changes to existing features

Release	Tool/Service	Ticket	Notes

Release	Tool/Service	Ticket	Notes
11.0	Assignments	SAK-29406 - Allow Assignment tool to grade with two decimal points CLOSED	The default number of decimal places for grading in Assignments is 2, expanded from 1.
11.0	Dropbox	SAK-11647 - Make Dropbox section-aware CLOSED	New for 11.

Sakai 11 skins using Morpheus

Documentation is stored with Sakai on Github

Sakai 11 changes the way sites are marked as "favorites"

Sakai 11 changes the way that sites marked as "favorites" are stored
in the database. If you are upgrading from an earlier version of
Sakai, you should run the "ConvertUserFavoriteSitesSakai11" script to
migrate your users' existing favorite sites to the new format.

You can run this script at any time following the upgrade to Sakai 11,
and Sakai does not need to be running for the script to work. If you
are planning an upgrade, a good time to run this is right before
starting Sakai 11 up for the first time.

The time required for the conversion will depend on how many users you
have in your system. As a rule of thumb, you can expect it to take
between 2-5 minutes per hundred thousand users.

To run the script, open a shell and run the following commands:

cd /path/to/your/tomcat-directory

Then, for Unix systems:

java -cp "lib/*" -Dtomcat.dir="$PWD" org.sakaiproject.user.util.ConvertUserFavoriteSitesSakai11

Or under Windows:

java -cp "lib\*" -Dtomcat.dir=%cd% org.sakaiproject.user.util.ConvertUserFavoriteSitesSakai11

Sakai Properties