How do I install Sakai Plus in my enterprise LMS?

This page contains documentation on how to install Sakai Plus into a number of LMS systems. The exact steps may vary depending on the system and version you are using. Please consult your enterprise LMS documentation for more information on setting up and configuring LTI tools.

To access this tool, select Plus Admin from the left menu in the Administration Workspace.

Select the Add Tenant button to create a new tenant.

A Sakai Plus server can support many "tenants." Each Learning System that you are plugging Sakai Plus into should have its own tenant. In Sakai Plus, all data within a tenant is isolated (each tenant is a "silo"). This way you can have a multi-tenant Sakai Plus server to serve many different learning systems. However it is also a quite typical use case to have one Enterprise LMS - say Canvas and one Sakai Plus server for the same school and to have a single Tenant entry in Sakai Plus for the Canvas system.

You can create a "draft" tenant with a Title and Issuer and optionally a Registration Lock. Once you have created a draft tenant, you can view the tenant to either start the LTI Dynamic Registration process or provide tool configuration to your calling learning system.

You can view the documentation for LTI Dynamic Registration at:

Enter the information for your new tenant into the fields provided.

  1. Title: Give your tenant an easily recognizable title, such as the name of your enterprise LMS. If you have more than one tenant in your system, you may also want to specify the version or group associated with a given tenant. This field is required.
  2. Issuer: Issuer is different for each LMS, but it is usually a URL like "https://plus.sakailms.org" - with no trailing slash. Sometimes this will be the domain where the LMS is hosted. For some cloud-hosted providers, they use one issuer across all customers. This field is required.
  3. Allowed Tools: This field is a colon-separated list of Sakai tool IDs, such as "sakai.resources:sakai.conversations" etc. There is a special "sakai.site" tool id which controls the availability of the "entire site" launch. A simple default for this is "sakai.site" or "sakai.site:sakai.resources: ...". This field is required.
  4. Trust Email: If the LMS that is calling Sakai Plus for this tenant sends email, you should trust the email address to avoid creating multiple user records for each user in each site. If you mark this tenant as "trust email," and the calling system provides the email address of the user, multiple launches from multiple contexts will all be linked to the same user within this Tenant in Sakai Plus.
  5. Time Zone: This is the timezone (for example, US/Eastern) for the controlling LMS. Sakai Plus will shift due dates into this timezone before creating or updating line items.
  6. Registration Lock: You set this field to "unlock" LTI Dynamic Registration for this tenant. It should only be set while performing dynamic registration and should be cleared after dynamic registration is complete. If the launching system does not support dynamic registration you will set these manually.
  7. Client ID: The client ID is provided by the launching LMS as part of tool registration. If the LMS supports LTI Dynamic Registration it will automatically populate this field.
  8. Deployment ID: The Deployment ID may vary depending upon your enterprise LMS. For some systems, the deployment ID is the same for an entire system and is provided as part of Dynamic Registration. For other systems, a new Deployment ID is generated by each course. You can set the Deployment ID to * if you can accept any Deployment ID for a particular Client ID.
  9. New Window Tools: This field is a colon-separated list of Sakai tool IDs which will be forced to always open in a new window. The "sakai.site" is always launched in a new window. This is typically left blank unless it is known that a particular tool just does not work well in an iframe. Or perhaps you are setting up a single tool server and want it to always be in a new window.
  10. Site Template: This specifies an existing site in your Sakai system (for example, !plussite) which will be copied to make a new site when Sakai Plus receives an incoming site. This template site determines the default tools that are added to the new Sakai Plus site. The default is !plussite unless it is changed using the plus.new.site.template Sakai property.
    1. You may go to the !plussite and add or remove tools in that site if you wish to make a custom set of tools available.
  11. Realm Template: This specifies an existing Sakai realm (for example, !site.template.lti) which will be copied to set the roles and permissions used when creating a new site when Sakai Plus receives an incoming site. The default is !site.template.lti unless it is changed using the plus.new.site.realm Sakai property.
  12. Inbound Role Map: This field allows for overriding the default mapping from incoming LTI roles to Sakai roles. See this documentation for detail on how role mapping works and the format for role mapping entries.
    1. Sakai to LTI Role Mapping
  13. Verbose Debugging: Turning verbose debugging on upgrades many of the debugging errors in the SakaiPlus code from debug.log to debug.info so they are placed in the normal Sakai log. In general this is useful for developers or during testing but will fill the log up if left on in production.
  14. The LMS Keyset URL, LMS Authorization URL, LMS Token URL, and LMS Token Audience fields are set up as part of tool registration with the calling learning system. If the system supports LTI Dynamic Registration these values should be set automatically.
    1. Note: The LMS Token Audience is left blank for most systems except for Desire2Learn.

Select Add Tenant.

Once you have finished entering the tenant information, select the Add Tenant button at the bottom of the screen to save the new draft tenant in the system. (Remember that many of the fields may be left empty if you are using dynamic registration to auto-fill the information when you register Sakai Plus with your enterprise LMS.)

Click on the title of your new draft tenant to view the configuration information.

The draft tenant information will display.

You will use the draft tenant information displayed on this screen to register Sakai Plus in your enterprise LMS.

Go to your enterprise LMS to complete the installation.

We have documentation below on how to install Sakai Plus into a number of LMS systems. If you have additional questions or need more detail on configuring Sakai Plus as an LTI tool, please see your enterprise LMS documentation for more information.