Tagging allows extra metadata about your files to be send to the external object store. These sources are defined in code, and currently cannot be configured on/off from the UI.
Currently, this is only implemented for the S3 file system client. Tagging vs metadata
Note object tags are different from object metadata.
Object metadata is immutable, and attached to the object on upload. With metadata, if you wish to update it (for example during a migration, or the sources changed), you have to copy the object with the new metadata, and delete the old object. This is not ideal, since deletion is optional in objectfs.
Object tags are more suitable, since their permissions can be managed separately (e.g. a client can be allowed to modify tags, but not delete objects).
See the S3 docs for more information about tagging.
You must allow s3:GetObjectTagging
and s3:PutObjectTagging
permission to the objectfs client.
The following sources are implemented currently:
What environment the file was uploaded in. Configure the environment using taggingenvironment
in the objectfs plugin settings.
This tag is also used by objectfs to determine if tags can be overwritten. See Multiple environments setup for more information.
Either orphan
if the file no longer exists in the files
table in Moodle, otherwise active
.
This feature is designed to work in situations where multiple environments (e.g. prod, staging) points to the same bucket, however, some setup is needed:
- Turn off
overwriteobjecttags
in every environment except the production environment. - Configure
taggingenvironment
to be unique for all environments.
By doing the above two steps, it will allow the production environment to always set its own tags, even if a file was first uploaded to staging and then to production.
Lower environments can still update tags, but only if the environment
matches theirs. This allows staging to manage object tags on objects only it knows about, but as soon as the file is uploaded from production (and therefore have it's environment tag replaced with prod
), staging will no longer touch it.
Only new objects uploaded after enabling this feature will have tags added. To backfill tags for previously uploaded objects, you must do the following:
- Manually run
trigger_update_object_tags
scheduled task from the UI, which queues aupdate_object_tags
adhoc task that will process all objects marked as needing sync. or - Call the CLI to execute a
update_object_tags
adhoc task manually.
You may need to update the DB to mark objects tag sync status as needing sync if the object has previously been synced before.
There is an additional graph added to the object summary report showing the tag value combinations and counts of each.
Note, this is only for files that have been uploaded from the respective environment, and may not be consistent for environments where overwriteobjecttags
is disabled (because the site does not know if a file was overwritten in the external store by another client).
Note the rules about sources:
- Identifier must be < 32 chars long.
- Value must be < 128 chars long.
While external providers allow longer key/values, we intentionally limit it to reserve space for future use. These limits may change in the future as the feature matures.
To add a new source:
- Implement
tag_source
- Add to the
tag_manager
class - As part of an upgrade step, mark all objects
tagsyncstatus
to needing sync (usingtag_manager
class, or manually in the DB) - As part of an upgrade step, queue a
update_object_tags
adhoc task to process the tag migration.