0004. Headless H5P via the escolalms/headless-h5p package

• Status: Accepted (retroactive)
• Date: 2021-04-26

Context and Problem Statement

Interactive content is authored in H5P. Existing H5P integrations (Moodle, Drupal, WordPress and the Laravel fork escolasoft/laravel-h5p used initially) render the player and editor server-side with an H5PIntegration global JS variable. That conflicts with a headless API whose UIs are separate React apps (ADR-0001).

Considered Options

• Keep the forked escolasoft/laravel-h5p (dev-dev-qunabu-patch-3) with server-side rendering and in-app controllers/migrations (state at 05ceebba).
• Write a headless H5P package exposing everything over REST.

Decision Outcome

Chosen: a dedicated package escolalms/headless-h5p (GitHub EscolaLMS/H5P). PR #15 removed the in-app H5P controller, repository, service, config and h5p_* migrations and the escolasoft/laravel-h5p + forked h5p-php-library repositories, and required escolalms/headless-h5p. The package provides REST endpoints for libraries and content CRUD, .h5p upload/export and the data the player/editor need; rendering is done client-side by the separately maintained @escolalms/h5p-react player used by admin/ and front/.

Consequences

• Good: H5P works in any front-end and fits the multi-domain/stateless model.
• Good: H5P code is testable in isolation (its own test suite in phpunit.xml).
• Bad: Escola maintains its own H5P integration and player, tracking upstream H5P changes alone.
• Bad: H5P assets served from object storage need CORS handling (a66ea765, 63572f6a “cors issues for h5p images”, 2023-01-10).

Evidence

• 1c0059ba 2021-04-26 “Attaching h5p lib to API (#15)” — deletes api/app/Http/Controllers/API/H5PAPIController.php, api/config/laravel-h5p.php, h5p_* migrations; api/composer.json -escolasoft/laravel-h5p, +escolalms/headless-h5p.
• 7fb4743c 2021-04-28 “Feature/h5p (#17)”.
• api/vendor/escolalms/headless-h5p/README.md — “no blade templates … different approach than moodle, drupal and wordpress h5p plugins”.