Consideration: Adding support for other universities

[p-fruck]

Hey there 👋 First of all, thanks for developing this awesome and comprehensive download program 😄

Back in my old university we used moodle, which has a great downloader available on GitHub that worked out of the box for the moodle instance of my university. With my new university using Ilias I hoped to be in a similar situation, but I could not find any sufficiently stable general purpose Ilias downloader. From what I found on GitHub, I think PFERD is the most robust ilias downloader (also having a nice architecture and a rather big community).

Rather than developing a new custom scraper for my university as many people seem to do, I modified PFERD to be able to login into the Ilias instance of my university (using integrated Ilias authentication instead of shibboleth) and I was able to download all contents of the course I used for testing (required minor modifications to the URL parsing). From this neat download script I used previously I would expect my changes to be compatible with most other Ilias instances by just modifying the base or login URL.

Currently, it seems like PFERD is a tool designed for the KIT only. Would you be willing to merge the changes described above to make PFERD a general purpose Ilias downloader? IMO this would provide a huge benefit to the community.

Cheers 🍻

[Garmelon]

Sounds like a good idea. I'm not opposed to merging something like this, but I won't be able to test and maintain non-KIT code. If it stops being maintained, it will probably be removed again sooner or later.

Even if it ends up not being merged, making a PR sounds like a good idea so other people in your situation can use your code. If your code isn't merge-ready, it would still be a good starting point.

Hopefully I'll find some time to work on PFERD again before the next semester starts. I'm planning on making it non-async again, which should simplify the code and infrastructure quite a bit, making it easier to maintain (at the cost of parallel downloads).

[p-fruck]

Nice! I'll refactor my changes and open a PR within the next few days ^^

[p-fruck]

Created #78 to publish my changes. If we are going to merge this PR, I'd strongly recommend adding tags like ilias, downloader, ilias-download etc to this repo increase discoverability. I personally only discovered repo because it was liked here