Materia

Canvas LTI Setup

Getting Materia to work seamlessly with Canvas

Installing Materia into Instructure’s Canvas LMS

Installing Materia LTI into Canvas adds some very nice-to-have integrations for students and faculty. It allows scores to be passed back to your course grade book and students to log in and play seamlessly.

Heroku LTI Configuration

Using the “Deploy to Heroku” button causes Heroku to generate a random secret for you. In most cases you simply need to locate those in the Heroku app dashboard. The LTI_SECRET and LTI_KEY values will be needed when you enter them into Canvas’s LTI App installation.

ENV Variables Configuration (v8.0.0 and newer)

Materia v8.0.0 added a simplified configuration. The common LTI settings can be set in .env.local or by using Environment variables.

Advanced Configuration (all versions)

Use the advanced method if:

FuelPHP Configuration Info

FuelPHP uses environments to determine which configuration options to load. For more information view the Fuelphp Documentation. The environment should be production for any server.

Assuming FUEL_ENV is set to production, FuelPHP will load and merge the following in order:

  1. fuel/app/packages/modules/lti/config/lti.php
  2. fuel/app/packages/modules/lti/config/production/lti.php

You can edit the base config or the environment config as needed by your use case.

Heroku is a special case. To update a configuration file on Heroku, you must save those changes and re-deploy your app. Manually changing files by editing them on the running app will not persist. If available, it is advisable to use env vars on Heroku.

Name Your Unique Materia Server (GUID)

Create a unique identifier for your Materia install. In the context of LTI tools, this should be unique to your server. Typically reverse domain notation is used, converting your server’s url https://materia.ucf.edu into to the value edu.ucf.materia.

Your GUID can be set in either:

Add a Consumer

When Materia receives an LTI launch, it looks at the tool_consumer_info_product_family_code sent by the consumer to determine which configuration to use.

Assuming an LTI launch is received using tool_consumer_info_product_family_code = canvas, Materia will search for the matching configuration by first checking for lti.consumer.canvas. If it doesn’t exist, the settings in lti.consumer.default will be used. Prior to v8.0.0, the default fallback doesn’t occur.

Default Consumer (Materia v8.0.0 and newer)

The default consumer is the easiest way to set common LTI settings for all LTI consumers. Changing a setting here will apply to all consumers that don’t match a specifically configured consumer.

For reference, the default consumer is defined in the lti.php config under lti.consumers.default.

Multiple Consumers

If different settings are needed for different LTI consumers, they can easily be defined by duplicating the contents of lti.consumers.default and creating a new consumer setting group. For instance, Obojobo uses the family code of obojobo-next. To define different settings for Obojobo, one would create lti.consumers.obojobo-next and populate it with the required settings.

For reference, a sample consumer for Obojobo Classic is commented out in lti.php config under lti.consumers.obojobo.

Setting up Canvas

First, take a look at Instructure’s tutorial which covers adding an extension to Canvas.

We usually use the “By URL” method, but you could also use “Paste XML” if desired. The URL (and XML) you’ll use should be visible at https://<YOUR_MATERIA_URL>/lti (view source for raw xml).

You’ll enter the following settings into the Add/Edit App form:

It is very important you keep the shared secret… well, secret.

Screen shot of installing Materia into Instructure's Canvas External Tools
Screen shot of installing Materia into Instructure's Canvas External Tools