[ARCHIVED] "Headless" Canvas

[trustmeimajedi]

Hi, 

I looked for an existing community thread on this but did not find one. 

We are in the early days of research Canvas our default LMS and wanted to know if its possible to deploy / configure Canvas as a headless LMS? We have a use case where we are looking into this as part of our infrastructure. 

I would very much appreciate it if anyone has explored such a route previously. 

Thanks! 

[JamesSekcienski]

I'm not sure if this is quite what you are looking for, but I thought you might be interested.  At InstructureCon 2012, one of the presenters made a proof of concept demo at the end that shows how you could use API calls with your own website to manage student and course registration.  https://youtu.be/LBQp0ls7mcI?t=1242

I haven't investigated it fully myself, but there is a lot of information you can get and things you can do with the API.  So it would be worth looking into seeing if it has all the functions you would need. https://canvas.instructure.com/doc/api/ 

[trustmeimajedi]

Hi James. Thanks for that, certainly interesting and aligned with parts of what we are trying to achieve. The objective being how we can best manage scale where there is a potentially high CCU and connect to Canvas where we have a separate React.JS UI of our own with a high degree of customization. Obviously the fact that Canvas support GraphQL is great. So we were thinking that connecting to a "headless" Canvas may be a possible direction.  

[JamesSekcienski]

You're welcome!  It sounds like you have some interesting plans in the works. 

I haven't worked with the GraphQL yet, but you may want to check out the Canvas Developers group to see what the experience has been like so far with it.  I know GraphQL is newer, so it may not have all the same functionality of the REST API yet.  https://community.canvaslms.com/t5/Canvas-Developers-Group/gh-p/developers