Tutor was designed to make it easy for everyone to run the latest release of Open edX. But sometimes, you want to run the latest, bleeding edge version of Open edX. This is what we call "running master", as opposed to running the release branch. Running the master branch in production is strongly **not** recommended, unless you are an Open edX expert and you really know what you are doing. But Open edX developers frequently need to run the master branch locally to implement and test new features. Thus, Tutor makes it easy to run Open edX on the master branch: this is called "Tutor Nightly".
Installing Tutor Nightly
------------------------
Running Tutor Nightly requires more than setting a few configuration variables: because there are so many Open edX settings, version numbers, etc. which may change between the latest release and the current master branch, Tutor Nightly is actually maintained as a separate branch of the Tutor repository. To install Tutor Nightly, you should install Tutor from the "nightly" branch of the source repository. To do so, run::
As usual, it is strongly recommended to run the command above in a `Python virtual environment <https://docs.python.org/3/tutorial/venv.html>`__.
All Tutor plugins that you wish to use should likewise be installed from the "nightly branch". For instance, the `MFE plugin <https://github.com/overhangio/tutor-mfe>`__::
To pull the latest upstream changes, you should first upgrade Tutor Nightly::
cd ./tutor
git pull
Then, you will have to generate a more recent version of the nightly Docker images. Images for running Tutor Nightly are published daily to docker.io (see `here <https://hub.docker.com/r/overhangio/openedx/tags?page=1&ordering=last_updated&name=nightly>`__). You can fetch the latest images with::
tutor images pull all
Alternatively, you may want to build the images yourself. As usual, this is done with::
tutor images build all
However, these images include the application master branch at the point in time when the image was built. The Docker layer caching mechanism might cause the ``git clone`` step from the build to be skipped. In such cases, you will have to bypass the caching mechanism with::
tutor images build --no-cache all
Running Tutor Nightly alongside the latest release
When running Tutor Nightly, you usually do not want to override your existing Tutor installation. That's why a Tutor Nightly installation has the following differences from a regular release installation:
- The default Tutor project root is different in Tutor Nightly. By default it is set to ``~/.local/share/tutor-nightly`` on Linux (instead of ``~/.local/share/tutor``). To modify this location check the :ref:`corresponding documentation <tutor_root>`.
- The plugins root is set to ``~/.local/share/tutor-nightly-plugins`` on Linux (instead of ``~/.local/share/tutor-plugins``). This location may be modified by setting the ``TUTOR_PLUGINS_ROOT`` environment variable.
- The default docker-compose project name is set to ``tutor_nightly_local`` (instead of ``tutor_local``). This value may be modified by manually setting the ``LOCAL_PROJECT_NAME``.
In general pull requests should be open on the "master" branch of Tutor: the "master" branch is automatically merged on the "nightly" branch at every commit, such that changes made to Tutor releases find their way to Tutor Nightly as soon as they are merged. However, sometimes you want to make changes to Tutor Nightly exclusively, and not to the Tutor releases. This might be the case for instance when upgrading the running version of a third party service (for instance: Elasticsearch, Mysql), or when the master branch requires specific changes. In that case, you should follow the instructions from the :ref:`contributing` section of the docs, with the following differences:
- Open your pull request on top of the "nightly" branch instead of "master".
- Add a description of your changes to CHANGELOG-nightly.md instead of CHANGELOG.md
