⚠️ Attention ⚠️

Concordia added 2-factor authentication, this means that the application can no longer log itself in to moodle and make requests on your behalf.

Example of received email

Pre-requisites:

Make sure you have the following installed: git, python3+

Setting up your environment

Downloading the repository

To clone the repo run the following in your terminal.

git clone https://github.com/volovikariel/moodle-notifier.git

Installing the depdencies

Then install all dependencies required to run the script by by running the following in your terminal.

python3 -m pip install -r requirements.txt

NOTE: On Windows, you may have to use py -3 instead of python3

Specifying your configuration

Run the following in your terminal to generate a .env file (which stores all your configuration).

python3 moodle_notifier.py

Inside the .env file, do the following:

1. Put in your portal username (the X_XXXXXX in concordia.ca\X_XXXXXX).
2. Put in your portal password.
3. Put in your email (only works with GMAIL).
4. Put in your email app password.
5. Put in the email(s) you want to receive the notifications.
6. Now put in the delay between fetches you'd like to have.

How to get an app password

1. go to manage my google account
2. Under "Signing in to Google" confirm that "2-Step Verification" is "On" for the account.
3. Under "Signing in to Google" Select "App passwords".
4. Select the app as "Mail" and the device as "Other (Custom name)" and name it (e.g: moodle_notifications).
5. Copy the app password, it will be in a yellow box and looks like: "XXXX XXXX XXXX XXXX".

Running the program

You can now try running the program by running

python3 moodle_notifier.py

Running the program in the background

If you're on Linux or Mac OSX

You can run the following in your terminal before closing it to have the script run in the background.

nohup python3 moodle_notifier.py &

If you ever want to kill the process you can run the following in your terminal to first find the process id, and then kill that process.

ps -e | grep python3

kill -9 id_returned

note: If you have several programs running on python3, then I'm not sure how further help you narrow it down. I use python3.10 and I never have other processes using it.

If you're on Windows

You can run the following in your terminal to run the script in the background

pythonw.exe moodle_notifier.py

To kill the process, you can open the task manager and kill the process called pythonw.exe.

Running the script on startup

If you're on Linux and using Systemd

Create a systemd service by creating a file called moodle-notifier.service under /etc/systemd/system/.

Set its contents to the following (remember to modify the directories and paths):

[Unit]
Description=Moodle Notification startup service
Documentation=https://github.com/volovikariel/moodle-notifier
After=network-online.target

[Service]
User=your_user
WorkingDirectory=/path/to/directory/containing/the/script
ExecStart=/path/to/python (e.g: /usr/bin/python) /path/to/directory/containing/the/script/moodle_notifier.py
Restart=always
StandardOutput=file:/path/to/where/you/want/to/save/your/logs
StandardError=file:/path/to/where/you/want/to/save/your/logs

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

Then reload the daemon to recognize the new service:

systemctl daemon-reload

Then you can start the service:

systemctl start moodle-notifier.service