ai-aside 3.8.6

A plugin containing xblocks and apps supporting GPT and other LLM use on edX.

ai-aside

Purpose

This plugin holds LLM related blocks and tools, initially the summary XBlock aside but eventually more options.

Getting Started

Developing

One Time Setup

# Clone the repository
git clone [e-mail]:openedx/ai-aside.git
cd ai-aside

# Set up a virtualenv using virtualenvwrapper with the same name as the repo and activate it
mkvirtualenv -p python3.8 ai-aside

Local testing

To test your changes locally, you will need to install the package from your local branch into edx-platform. For example, if using devstack, copy or clone your branch into <devstack-parent>/src/ai-aside. Bring up the LMS and CMS containers in devstack, and run this make target in the ai-aside directory:

make install-local

You should see it uninstall any existing ai-aside in and install your local source, for both the CMS and LMS.

The plug-in configuration will automatically be picked up once installed. Changes will be hot reloaded after the next LMS or CMS restart.

If you would like to manually install ai-aside, go to your lms or cms shell and run:

pip install -e /edx/src/ai-aside

Run Migrations

You will also need to run migrations for local testing. Using the same lms or cms shell as before, run:

./manage.py lms migrate ai_aside

Testing in Docker with AI-spot

If you are running both devstack and a local instance of the supporting ai-spot in docker, you need two pieces of special setup to let ai-spot call the aside handler and retrieve content.

The first is to connect ai-spot to the devstack network with a docker command:

docker network connect devstack_default ai-spot-server-1

The second is to change the handler URLs generated by ai-aside to a URL that is accessible by ai-spot in the same docker. This is already set up for you in summaryhook_aside/settings/devstack.py. If your AI service is running locally outside of docker, you will need to change that setting.

Enabling the Aside

For the summary aside to work, you will have to make two changes in the LMS admin:

1. You must create an XBlockAsidesConfig (admin URL: /admin/lms_xblock/xblockasidesconfig/). This model has a list of blocks you do not want asides to apply to that can be left alone, and an enabled setting that unsurprisingly should be True.

2. You must enable a course waffle flag for each course you want to summarize. summaryhook.summaryhook_enabled is the main one, summaryhook_enabled.summaryhook_staff_only can be used if you only want staff to see it.

3. You must enable a course waffle flag if you want to use the feature for enabling/disabling the summary by its settings. summaryhook.summaryhook_summaries_configuration. If this flag is enabled, you can enable/disable the courses and the blocks by its settings.

Aside Settings API

There are some endpoints that can be used to pinpoint units to be either enabled or disabled based on their configs. The new settings work as follows: - If a course is enabled, the summary for all the blocks for that course are enabled by default. - If a course is disabled or the setting does not exists, then the summary for all the blocks from that course are disabled by default. - If a block has its own settings, it will override any other setting with the one that is saved. - If a block does not have any settings saved, then the enabled state will fall back to the course’s enabled state mentioned above.

The new endpoints for updating these settings are:

Fetch settings

Method	Path	Responses
GET	ai_aside/v1/:course_id	Code 200: { "success": true } Code 400: { "success": false, "message": "(description)" } Code 404: { "success": false }
GET	ai_aside/v1/:course_id/:unit_id

Update settings

Method	Path	Payload	Responses
POST	ai_aside/v1/:course_id	{ "enabled": true|false }	Code 200: { "success": true } Code 400: { "success": false, "message": "(description)" }
POST	ai_aside/v1/:course_id/:unit_id	{ "enabled": true|false }

Delete settings

Method	Path	Responses
DELETE	ai_aside/v1/:course_id	Code 200: { "success": true } Code 400: { "success": false, "message": "(description)" } Code 404: { "success": false }
DELETE	ai_aside/v1/:course_id/:unit_id

Every time you develop something in this repo

# Activate the virtualenv
workon ai-aside

# Grab the latest code
git checkout main
git pull

# Install/update the dev requirements
make requirements

# Run the tests and quality checks (to verify the status before you make any changes)
make validate

# Make a new branch for your changes
git checkout -b <your_github_username>/<short_description>

# Using your favorite editor, edit the code to make your change.
vim ...

# Run your new tests
pytest ./path/to/new/tests

# Run all the tests and quality checks
make validate

# Commit all your changes
git commit ...
git push

# Open a PR and ask for review.

Deploying

This plugin is deployed on edx.org following How to add private requirements to edx-platform.

License

The code in this repository is licensed under the AGPL 3.0 unless otherwise noted.

Please see LICENSE.txt for details.

Contributing

Contributions are very welcome. Please read How To Contribute for details.

This project is currently accepting all types of contributions, bug fixes, security fixes, maintenance work, or new features. However, please make sure to have a discussion about your new feature idea with the maintainers prior to beginning development to maximize the chances of your change being accepted. You can start a conversation by creating a new issue on this repo summarizing your idea.

The Open edX Code of Conduct

All community members are expected to follow the Open edX Code of Conduct.

People

The assigned maintainers for this component and other project details may be found in Backstage. Backstage pulls this data from the catalog-info.yaml file in this repo.

Reporting Security Issues

Please do not report security issues in public. Please email [e-mail].

Change Log

Unreleased

3.8.6 - 2026-03-24

• Fixed is_summary_enabled() to properly check course-level settings when no unit record exists

• This ensures course-level toggle correctly controls summary button visibility

3.8.5 - 2026-02-10

• Added client ID support for unit summary feature

• Updated build process to use python -m build instead of setup.py

3.8.2 - 2025-05-14

• Fixed bug where necessary class variables were not set on the AiAsideCourseApp class

3.8.1 - 2025-05-13

• Bumped ubuntu version to latest for the PyPi publishing job

3.8.0 - 2025-05-07

• Added setting to control whether the summary should be enabled by default

• Bumped actions/setup-python from 4 to 5

• Added setting to set the default enabled state for course summaries

• Updated readme deployment section

• Added course_app/plugin for unit summaries

3.7.0 — 2023-11-20

• Moved standard error handling to where it will not bother newrelic

3.6.2 — 2023-10-12

• Handle rare blocks missing dates when calculating last updated

• Remove log of expected “not here” exception during config

3.6.1 — 2023-10-10

• Resolve scenario where a user has no associated enrollment value

3.6.0 – 2023-10-05

• Include user role in summary hook HTML.

• Add make install-local target for easy devstack installation.

3.5.0 – 2023-09-04

• Add edx-drf-extensions lib.

• Add JwtAuthentication checks before each request.

• Add SessionAuthentication checks before each request.

• Add HasStudioWriteAccess permissions checks before each request.

3.4.0 – 2023-08-30

• Include last updated timestamp in summary hook HTML, derived from the blocks.

• Also somewhat reformats timestamps in the handler return to conform to ISO standard.

3.3.1 – 2023-08-21

• Remove no longer needed first waffle flag summaryhook_enabled

3.3.0 – 2023-08-16

Features

• Add xpert summaries configuration by default for units

3.2.0 – 2023-07-26

Features

• Added the checks for the module settings behind the waffle flag summaryhook.summaryhook_summaries_configuration.

• Added is this course configurable endpoint

• Error suppression logs now include block ID

• Missing video transcript is caught earlier in content fetch

3.1.0 – 2023-07-20

Features

• Added API endpoints for updating settings for courses and modules (enable/disable for now) (Has migrations)

3.0.1 – 2023-07-20

• Add positive log when summary fragement decides to inject

3.0.0 – 2023-07-16

Features

• Summary content handler now requires a staff user identity, otherwise returns 403. This is a breaking change.

• Added models to summaryhook_aside (Has migrations)

• Catch exceptions in a couple of locations so the aside cannot crash content.

2.0.2 – 2023-07-05

Fix

• Updated HTML parser to remove tags with their content for specific cases like <script> or <style>.

2.0.1 – 2023-06-29

Fix

• Fix transcript format request and conversion

2.0.0 – 2023-06-28

Added

• Adds a handler endpoint to provide summarizable content

• Improves content length checking using that summarizable content

1.2.1 – 2023-05-19

Fixes

• Fix summary-aside settings package

1.2.0 – 2023-05-11

Added

• Porting over summary-aside from edx-arch-experiments version 1.2.0