Adapt Learning Community: "Don't attempt to use Adapt CLI with an authoring tool installation"?

On this page here: https://github.com/adaptlearning/adapt_framework/wiki/Adapt-Command-Line-Interface
It reads:"Important: the CLI is only for use with developing standalone courses using the framework. Please do not attempt to use it in conjunction with an authoring tool installation."

Please correct me if I'm wrong, but this seems misleading. Both the framework and AT are installed together and most things outside of course creation must be done via command-line, so why is this a problem? How is one supposed to customize, add plugins and themes without using adapt-cli?
Can someone explain what this means?

The authoring tool does indeed use the framework as its engine, but it expects that plug-ins (components, themes, menus, extensions) will be uploaded and installed via its own processes. Indeed it has a plug-in manager where a course author may add plug-ins. It does this because the authoring tool has to deal with a number of issues that the framework doesn't, e.g., multi-tenancy. The authoring tool utilizes a "database" (Mongo) whereas the framework does not. Using the Adapt CLI to install plug-ins intended to be used by the authoring tool will by-pass some of the associated tasks necessary for the AT to manage plug-ins.

Also, the authoring tool is intended specifically to relieve users from having to resort to the command line. If you feel that the authoring tool constrains you as a developer, I recommend that you move your work flow to the framework.

Hope this helps, Khari.
- Chuck

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Thanks, Chuck, okay what you say about plugins makes sense, but what I guess I'm struggling to understand is how other things like upgrading AT versions, upgrading software dependencies (node.js, grunt, etc.), troubleshooting errors in the terminal should be done if not using Adapt CLI. What is the proper way to upgrade the AT? Many of the documentation pages state to make sure Adapt CLI is installed before running installation and upgrade commands. Is this only applicable to the framework? Maybe that's what I'm confused about.

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Hi Khari

Doing things like upgrading the authoring tool is done via the command line but I think is mostly handled by Node

I think you might be mixing up the CLI as a general concept with the Adapt CLI which is a command line utility we've built to provide some 'convenience' commands for:

setting up a new Adapt course
managing plugins in your Adapt course
managing plugins in the plugin registry

All these apply to working directly with the framework (or the plugin registry).

I'm not sure if the authoring tool actually uses the Adapt CLI 'under the hood' or not - I mainly work on the Framework side so not much of an expert on the AT side of things - but given that the installation instructions state that you should install it I guess it must do in some way.

Even on the framework side, most of the commands you run are actually $ grunt commands rather than $ adapt commands. You only actually need to use the Adapt CLI when managing plugins in the plugin registry. For all other tasks there are other methods/tools that can be used instead of the Adapt CLI & Grunt.

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thanks for the explanation, Matt. I eventually did figure this out, when I tried the server installation method instead of the Vagrant method I started with. While it was still a little complicated navigating all the errors, I think this is probably the better way when using the AT.

Now one more question on this: At some point I had the Vagrant install method of the AT and the manual install method on my Windows laptop. In the end the AT seems to stop responding: no preview, error contact admin, and other fun stuff. Is this intended? Are users not supposed to have manual framework and AT installations on the same computer?

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