Version 2.4.0

New Features

  • Added the ability to specify a snippet of HTML code to be included in the HTML head section of training portal, workshop dashboard and workshop instructions pages. For more details see Overriding styling of the workshop.

  • Added support for monitoring the training portal and workshop sessions with Microsoft Clarity. Note that Clarity doesn’t support any concept of events. Further, currently CSS data will not be available to Clarity for workshop sessions as it is behind user authentication for the session. This means page depictions in recordings and heatmaps will not be correct. For more details see Tracking using Microsoft Clarity.

  • Added support for monitoring the training portal and workshop sessions with Amplitude. Only events pertaining to workshop sessions are sent to Amplitude, and not events which are generated internally to the training portal or operator. For more details see Tracking using Amplitude.

  • Added the ability to specify the name of a persistent volume claim to be used for storage by the workshop, docker and registry. This is in place of specifying the storage size and having Educates worry about creation of the persistent volume claim. Do note that the registry is a separate deployment to the workshop (where docker daemon also runs as side car container) so you cannot share a persistent volume claim of type ReadWriteOnce between the registry and workshop unless you know you have a single node cluster. For more details see Mounting a persistent volume, Enabling ability to use docker and Enabling session image registry.

  • Added the new CLI sub command educates admin secrets import to allow arbitrary secrets to be added to the local secrets cache.

Features Changed

  • If using Google Analytics you must now be using Google Analytics 4. Use of the older Universal Analytics is no longer supported. Do note that Google is retiring Universal Analytics in July 2023, so you need to migrate to Google Analytics 4 regardless. For more details see Tracking using Google Analytics.

  • When events are reported to Google Analytics or the webhook consumer, the names of some of the event properties have been renamed to to align with naming conventions for workshops and workshop environments.

    session_namespace -> session_name
workshop_namespace -> environment_name

    A new event property of session_owner has also been added. This will be the internal identifier used by the training portal to identify the user across workshop sessions. Alternatively, if a front end portal had supplied its own user identifer when creating a workshop session using the REST API of the training portal, it will be used instead. Do note that it is recommended that any such user ID if supplied by a front end portal still be effectively anonymous, eg., a uuid, and not an email address.

    The names of properties included in supplemental data for some events have also changed, such as properties identifying pages within workshop instructions, embedded terminals and clickable actions.

Bugs Fixed

  • When specifying storage for a workshop session, or docker was enabled, and a custom workshop image was being used, files from the custom workshop image were not being copied from the workshop home directory into the persistent volume, or shared container storage, as expected. The workshop content would therefore be missing. This mechanism was broken in version 2.3.0 of Educates.

  • Events denoting that a workshop had been finished or terminated, generated for analytics from a workshop session, could be lost and not delivered as the immediate page redirection that followed would occur before the tasks to deliver the events got to run. A workshop session now has a cleanup phase whereby time is allowed for sending the events when a workshop session is being ended.

  • If using the Chrome browser and the embedded VS Code editor was enabled, all attempts to paste into a shell terminal created within VS Code would fail. This started occurring with a version of Chrome released towards the end of 2022. It is now possible to paste into the shell terminal, however the Chrome browser will ask you the first time for permission to do it for the site before allowing it.

  • When syncing secrets using the CLI from the local secret cache to the cluster, secret data was being ignored if it was declared using the stringData property of a Kubernetes secret, rather than the data property.

  • The ingress protocol property was not being reported in Google Analytics events correctly.