Gaining an LTI Developer Key Outside of My Institution

[BenBenson]

I am an adjunct faculty and I want to develop tools I find useful. I can do some superficial things with an open authenticated session, but to do anything interesting I need an LTI dev key. 

My institution does not allow development in the live environment. 

I've seen a few posts that I can either use the open source version, or become a partner since I can't get a key from my institution. 

Open source is not the route I want to go. 

I've submitted multiple requests via the partner page but have not received any reply on how to become a partner. I've seen it referenced in multiple places that if I want to go that route "there is a cost" - does anyone know what that cost is? Is there anyone specific that I can reach out to directly to attempt to sort this out more promptly? 

[chriscas]

Hi @BenBenson,

I asked a member of the community team if there's any way they can ping someone to get in touch with you.  If that's not successful, maybe someone else in the Developers Group here will have some advice.

-Chris

[themidiman]

@BenBenson , in addition to what @chriscas has been doing for you, perhaps you could ask your institution to see what the cost would be in your contract agreement with Instructure to spin up another instance for you to play with. In our agreement it wasn't too expensive to spin up a sandbox environment that isn't tied to our live environment. In addition to the developer key tab for LTI stuff, all of our consortia group members have access to this to turn on new features and play with them without the fear of touching anything related to live data. 

[sendres]

HI @BenBenson,

You're not going to like me for saying this, but I think using the open source distribution is the way to go. In my experience, it's really not that hard to set up. You could probably be up and running in an hour or two and at no cost (other than a machine to install it on).

1. Computer - Grab a recent computer with, say, 250GB of available storage, 12–16GB of RAM, and a quad-core or better CPU. The install scripts work great on Mac (probably because that's what Instructure developers use). You can use a PC running Ubuntu with good results (or so I've heard.
2. Docker - Install Docker on the computer. Open the settings and make sure it has 8.0GB or more memory assigned to it. (On my 16GB Mac, Docker likes to sneakily allocate 7.9GB by default, which makes the setup fail.
3. Canvas - Download Canvas using Git (preferred, so you can keep up with changes) or just a ZIP download (probably fine for getting started). Then follow the Quick Start instructions.

Give it a try. We're here to help if you run into issues (which can admittedly be a little hard to troubleshoot since your environment, by definition, is a one-off). But I'd go so far as to say the complexity of setting up open source Canvas on your own hardware a hill in comparison to the mountain of building external tools and integrating them with Canvas, so you've nothing to lose!

[jcrossonhill]

Hi @BenBenson 

Sorry to hear that you haven't gotten a response. You are correct that there are really two paths to doing the development you're talking about. You can self-host the open source version, which I agree isn't the best method. The other is to become an official partner at the integration tier level which gives you a sandbox instance of Canvas. 

Our Developer Relations team primarily supports partners with their technical integration questions and consults on best practices. We'd be happy to learn more about what you're trying to achieve and if needed, connect you with a member of our partnerships team to get a sandbox. You can reach us at dev-relations@instructure.com