Now that Tutor is the official community installation for Open edX, it no
longer makes sense to host a forum that is separate from the general Open edX
forum. Moving conversations there will encourage cross-communication between
projects and maintainers. This change is part of a larger overhaul described in
this Tutor enhancement proposal (TEP):
https://discuss.overhang.io/t/tep-rethinking-the-tutor-maintainers-program/2724
In the future, plugin maintainers should point their users to the Open edX
forum as well. They are encouraged to create dedicated "tutor-pluginnname" tags
on the forum and to set their notification level to "watching".
The default user in the mysql container is 'mysql',
so the `mysql` command tries to use the 'mysql' MySQL user by default.
But, in the MySQL dump instructions,
we are providing the MySQL root user's password, so we need
to specify `MYSQL_ROOT_USERNAME` as the MySQL user when invoking `mysql`.
Running `local start` while a dev platform is still running is a common sourse
of mistakes. Here we introduce a new action to automatically stop local and dev
projects whenever a project with a different name is started.
`copyfrom` copies data from a container to the local filesystem. It's similar
to bindmount, but less clunky, and more intuitive. Also, it plays along great
with `--mount`. Eventually we'll just get rid of the `bindmount` command and
the `--volume` option.
`tutor dev runserver` will be removed in a future release.
Developers are encouraged to use `tutor dev start` instead,
which is more flexible and provides a consistent interface
with `tutor local start`.
As part of this deprecation, we enable the `tty` and
`stdin_open` options on development docker-compose
services. This will allow developers to use `start`
for breakpoint debugging, which was previously only
availble via `runserver`. Several parallel PRs have
been merged in order to make the same change in the
development services of the official plugins.
Although `start` does not support the `--volume` option,
it supports a more-powerful `--mount` option. So, where
developers previously used:
tutor dev runserver --volume ...
to bind-mount host directories, they should now use:
tutor dev start --mount ...
Resolves https://github.com/overhangio/2u-tutor-adoption/issues/61
The `--mount` option is available both with `tutor local`
and `tutor dev` commands. It allows users to easily bind-mount containers from
the host to containers. Yes, I know, we already provide that possibility with
the `bindmount` command and the `--volume=/path/` option. But these suffer from
the following drawbacks:
- They are difficult to understand.
- The "bindmount" command name does not make much sense.
- It's not convenient to mount an arbitrary folder from the host to multiple
containers, such as the many lms/cms containers (web apps, celery workers and
job runners).
To address this situation, we now recommend to make use of --mount:
1. `--mount=service1[,service2,...]:/host/path:/container/path`: manually mount
`/host/path` to `/container/path` in container "service1" (and "service2").
2. `--mount=/host/path`: use the new v1 plugin API to discover plugins that
will detect this option and select the right containers in which to bind-mount
volumes. This is really nifty...
Close https://github.com/overhangio/2u-tutor-adoption/issues/43
Add `tutor dev quickstart` command, which is equivalent to
`tutor local quickstart`, but uses dev containers instead
of local production ones and includes some other small
differences for the convience of Open edX developers.
This should remove some friction
from the Open edX development setup process, which previously
required that users provision using local producation
containers but then stop them and switch to dev containers:
* tutor local quickstart
* tutor local stop
* tutor dev start -d
Document the command and its improved workflow in
./docs/tutorials/nightly.rst
Fixes overhangio/2u-tutor-adoption#58
Previously, it was possible to override settings by defining the
TUTOR_EDX_PLATFORM_SETTINGS environment variable. But let's face it:
- It was not very well supported.
- It was poorly explained.
- It was not very useful.
- It causes unnecessary code complexity.
For these reasons, we drop that feature.
This is a very large refactoring which aims at making Tutor both more
extendable and more generic. Historically, the Tutor plugin system was
designed as an ad-hoc solution to allow developers to modify their own
Open edX platforms without having to fork Tutor. The plugin API was
simple, but limited, because of its ad-hoc nature. As a consequence,
there were many things that plugin developers could not do, such as
extending different parts of the CLI or adding custom template filters.
Here, we refactor the whole codebase to make use of a generic plugin
system. This system was inspired by the Wordpress plugin API and the
Open edX "hooks and filters" API. The various components are added to a
small core thanks to a set of actions and filters. Actions are callback
functions that can be triggered at different points of the application
lifecycle. Filters are functions that modify some data. Both actions and
filters are collectively named as "hooks". Hooks can optionally be
created within a certain context, which makes it easier to keep track of
which application created which callback.
This new hooks system allows us to provide a Python API that developers
can use to extend their applications. The API reference is added to the
documentation, along with a new plugin development tutorial.
The plugin v0 API remains supported for backward compatibility of
existing plugins.
Done:
- Do not load commands from plugins which are not enabled.
- Load enabled plugins once on start.
- Implement contexts for actions and filters, which allow us to keep track of
the source of every hook.
- Migrate patches
- Migrate commands
- Migrate plugin detection
- Migrate templates_root
- Migrate config
- Migrate template environment globals and filters
- Migrate hooks to tasks
- Generate hook documentation
- Generate patch reference documentation
- Add the concept of action priority
Close #499.
PR #619 set the EDX_PLATFORM_VERSION build arg's default to
OPENEDX_COMMON_VERSION. While this works fine for setting a
non-default branch to run edx code from (say, "master"), it may break
if the user sets OPENEDX_COMMON_VERSION to a branch or tag name that
does not exist upstream in repositories *other than*
EDX_PLATFORM_REPOSITORY.
Thus, introduce a separate configuration parameter,
EDX_PLATFORM_VERSION, to match the build arg of the same name. Set its
default to OPENEDX_COMMON_VERSION.
This way, the user can deploy an arbitrarily-named fork of
edx-platform, while retaining the default OPENEDX_COMMON_VERSION
(like, for example "open-release/maple.3") for everything else.
The docs recommend commands like:
pip install tutor[full]
pip install -e ./tutor[full]
for installing Tutor. These work fine in bash. For zsh,
though, which is now the default on macOS, quotes are
needed, otherwise zsh will interpret the brackets as
special syntax:
pip install "tutor[full]"
pip install -e "./tutor[full]"
Caveat: I have not tested this myself since I don't
own a Mac, but I've read several issue reports to this
effect, such as:
https://github.com/pypa/pipenv/issues/2830#issuecomment-419593199
The full installation will include all the plugins that
come bundled with Tutor stable. This is made possible by
a recent change to Tutor Nightly
(https://github.com/overhangio/tutor/pull/626).
Previously, the only way for Tutor users to use a fork of edx-platform
or a custom NPM registry was to use build args during the image build.
This is suboptimal in the case of automatically building images from
CI pipelines, which may want to auto-detect when an image needs to be
rebuilt based on config.yml changes.
In addition, the EDX_PLATFORM_VERSION build argument can already be
set via a corresponding config.yml parameter (OPENEDX_COMMON_VERSION),
so it's reasonable to follow that precedent and also introduce
config.yml parameters to correspond with the EDX_PLATFORM_REPOSITORY
and NPM_REGISTRY build arguments.
Thus, introduce two new configuration parameters:
- EDX_PLATFORM_REPOSITORY
- NPM_REGISTRY
These parameters can now optionally be used instead of the
aforementioned build args.
I found the existing docs a bit light on the particulars
of how the YAML and Python plugin APIs relate. I was
able to figure it out (there's a nice congruence
between them) but I think these tweaks should it make
it more immediately obvious to readers how the Python
API is a essentially a superset of the YAML API that
allows for dynamic behavior.
because it only contains CLI reference information currently.
The folder structure implies that eventually there will be
more reference material, so the name of 'reference.rst'
was *not* changed to 'cli-reference.rst'.
`upgrade` had several issues, which are summarized here:
https://discuss.overhang.io/t/confusing-instructions-during-upgrade/2281/7
- The docs say that you should run quickstart, but what most people will see is
the big command tutor local upgrade --from=lilac verbatim paragraph.
- The local upgrade command should be very explicit about the fact that users
need to run quickstart.
- Maybe the name of the local upgrade command should be improved.
- When upgrading tutor from one major release to the next, there should be a
more explicit warning to inform users of what they are doing (see this other
conversation 1)
- We should tell people that they almost certainly need to enable the tutor and
the mfe plugins, if they are not enabled during upgrade.
- A link to all of the breaking changes from the changelog should be
prominently displayed during upgrade.
- The docs should emphasize that upgrading from one major release to the next
is potentially a risky endeavor and that downgrading is not possible. The docs
should also link to the changelog.
This commit has grown slightly beyond the intended scope, but the changes should be mostly positive.
- A shared cookie domain between lms and cms is no longer recommended:
https://github.com/edx/edx-platform/blob/master/docs/guides/studio_oauth.rst
- refactor: clean mounted data folder in lms/cms. In Lilac, the
bind-mounted lms/data and cms/data folders are a mess because new
folders are created there for every new course organisation. These
folders are empty. As far as we know they are useless... With this
change we move these folders to a dedicated "modulestore" subdirectory;
which corresponds better to the initial intent of the fs_root setting.
- fix: frontend failure during login to the lms. See:
https://github.com/openedx/build-test-release-wg/issues/104
- feat: move all forum-related code to a dedicated plugin. Forum is an
optional feature, and as such it deserves its own plugin. Starting from
Maple, users will be able to install the forum from
https://github.com/overhangio/tutor-forum/
- migrate from DCS_* session cookie settings to SESSION_*. That's
because edx-platform no longer depends on django-cookies-samesite. Close
https://github.com/openedx/build-test-release-wg/issues/110
- get rid of tons of deprecation warnings in the lms/cms
- feat: make it possible to point to themed assets. Cherry-picking this
change makes it possible to point to themed assets with a theme-agnostic
url, notably from MFEs.
- Install all official plugins as part of the `tutor[full]` package.
- Don't print error messages about loading plugins during autocompletion.
- Prompt for image building when upgrading from one release to the next.
- Add `tutor local start --skip-build` option to skip building Docker images.
Close #450.
Close #545.
This introduces quite a few changes to make it easier to run Caddy as a load
balancer in Kubernetes:
- Make it possible to start/stop a selection of resources with ``tutor k8s
start/stop [names...]``.
- Make it easy to deploy an independent LoadBalancer by converting the caddy
service to a NodePort when ``ENABLE_WEB_PROXY=false``.
- Add a ``app.kubernetes.io/component: loadbalancer`` label to the LoadBalancer
service.
- Add ``app.kubernetes.io/name`` labels to all services.
- Preserve the LoadBalancer service in ``tutor k8s stop`` commands.
- Wait for the caddy deployment to be ready before running initialisation jobs.
Close #532.
Forum is an optional feature, and as such it deserves its own plugin. Starting
from Maple, users will be able to install the forum from
https://github.com/overhangio/tutor-forum/
Close #450.
With this change, containers are no longer run as "root" but as unprivileged
users. This is necessary in some environments, notably some Kubernetes
clusters.
To make this possible, we need to manually fix bind-mounted volumes in
docker-compose. This is pretty much equivalent to the behaviour in Kubernetes,
where permissions are fixed at runtime if the volume owner is incorrect. Thus,
we have a consistent behaviour between docker-compose and Kubernetes.
We achieve this by bind-mounting some repos inside "*-permissions" services.
These services run as root user on docker-compose and will fix the required
permissions, as per build/permissions/setowner.sh These services simply do not
run on Kubernetes, where we don't rely on bind-mounted volumes. There, we make
use of Kubernete's built-in volume ownership feature.
With this change, we get rid of the "openedx-dev" Docker image, in the sense
that it no longer has its own Dockerfile. Instead, the dev image is now simply
a different target in the multi-layer openedx Docker image. This makes it much
faster to build the openedx-dev image.
Because we declare the APP_USER_ID in the dev/docker-compose.yml file, we need
to pass the user ID from the host there. The only way to achieve that is with a
tutor config variable. The downside of this approach is that the
dev/docker-compose.yml file is no longer portable from one machine to the next.
We consider that this is not such a big issue, as it affects the development
environment only.
We take this opportunity to replace the base image of the "forum" image. There
is now no need to re-install ruby inside the image. The total image size is
only decreased by 10%, but re-building the image is faster.
In order to run the smtp service as non-root, we switch from namshi/smtp to
devture/exim-relay. This change should be backward-compatible.
Note that the nginx container remains privileged. We could switch to
nginxinc/nginx-unprivileged, but it's probably not worth the effort, as we are
considering to get rid of the nginx container altogether.
Close #323.
Added OPENEDX_EXTRA_PIP_REQUIREMENTS setting, which allows to specify
extra pip packages that should be installed.
Moved "openedx-scorm-xblock" package from Dockerfile to the new setting
in the config.yml.
Limits the memory chek to the 'local quickstart' command, makes error
handling more accurate and adds warning messages for some conditions.
Also adds a mention of this in troubleshooting.rst.
In conversations with edX, we learned that the name "edge" had negative
undertones for historical reasons. Thus, we switch to "nightly", which means
pretty much the same thing.
Here, we make it possible to automatically append a suffix to the version and app
name (in the sense of appdirs). This guarantees that a tutor edge project will
not accidentally override another community release.
In addition, we take the opportunity to document the tutor versioning format.
(I've been meaning to do that for a long time)
This ensures that any warning generated from compiling the docs is treated as
an error. Also, building the docs is now one of the steps performed in CI.
<rant>I attempted to actually run Tutor with Podman and I was sorely disappointed.
The only reliable source of docs that I found concerning the integration with
docker-compose is this blog post:
https://www.redhat.com/sysadmin/podman-docker-compose
There are no other official docs 😓
1. The instructions given in the blog post don't work out of the box. Launching
the podman service failed altogether on Ubuntu 20.04 and 20.10. It worked on
CentOS 8, but some parameters need to changed, such as the docker socket path.
2. After I got the podman service working, I managed to get an Open edX
platform running with tutor, but with the root user. Then, containers
complained that they could not write data to the bind-mounted volumes. I
attempted to run as a non-root user, and discovered that the podman socket is
only readable by root. This should explain why all commands from that blog post
are prefixed by sudo.
Long story short, I was hoping to update the tutorial. Instead, I'm just moving
it for the sake of better organisation. For the life of me, I do not understand
why some people would want to run Podman instead of Docker. Bad documentation
is an immediate turn-off for me. From my perspective, podman is mostly an
overblown marketina stunt.</rant>
There is too much information in each of the local/k8s/dev docs pages. The
"guides" that are listed in each one of those pages are moved either to "common
tasks" or to a dedicated "tutorials" section. This paves the way for more
comprehensive tutorials, where we describe how to run the latest master
branches of Open edX.
I am well aware that, as they stand, the tutorials are of poor quality and
should be rewritten. This is a task for another day/commit. For now, we only
move the contents to a separate part of the docs.
Also, we should add a "reference" section to the docs, where we add the result
of `tutor <subcommand> --help`.
Previously, the list of domain names to which a theme was assigned had to be
specified manually. Now, the themes are automatically assigned to the LMS and
the CMS, both in development and production modes.
It should be unnecessary to build a custom openedx-dev Docker image. All tests
can run from within the dev Docker image, with a couple additional environment
variables.
The package maintainer of the "tutor" package was kind enough to
transfer ownership of the project to us. This is great, because we no
longer have to use the "openedx" suffix, which is trademarked.
For the time being, we keep maintaining the "tutor-openedx" package
which has a 1-to-1 dependency on the "tutor" package. In the future, we
expect that we will no longer push upgrades to tutor-openedx.
Here we add to the docs a few shameless plugs about Cairn -- because
it's really awesome!
We also add a few improvements to the wording, here and there.
We remove security patches and custom fixes which are now part of koa.3.
We take the opportunity to make it possible to build the openedx Docker image
without relying on a corresponding openedx-i18n repo tag: often, we want to
test whether the image simply builds successfully, and we don't need up-to-date
translations. For those cases, it's now possible to pass the `-a
OPENEDX_I18N_VERSION=oldertag` build argument.
First, allow using custom Django settings on a development
environment (as documented but not implemented), setting it to the
correct value of `tutor.development`. Prior to this, `tutor dev
runserver lms` would default to `tutor.production` when on a custom edX
branch.
Second, fix the documentation so the correct environment variable is
described, at the same time removing an option that doesn't seem to work.
See discussion: https://discuss.overhang.io/t/koa-dev-lms-doesnt-find-static-content/1250
We manage to get unit tests to run in a dedicated openedx-test container. Only
35 tests are failing (out of 17k). I suspect these tests are also failing in
the devstack.
This introduces a new dev/local command:
tutor dev bindmount CONTAINER PATH
And a new volume syntax:
tutor dev run --volume=PATH CONTAINER
This syntax automatically bind-mounts folders from the tutorroot/volumes
directory, which is pretty nifty.
- 💥[Improvement] Upgrade Open edX to Koa
- 💥 Setting changes:
- The ``ACTIVATE_HTTPS`` setting was renamed to ``ENABLE_HTTPS``.
- Other ``ACTIVATE_*`` variables were all renamed to ``RUN_*``.
- The ``WEB_PROXY`` setting was removed and ``RUN_CADDY`` was added.
- The ``NGINX_HTTPS_PORT`` setting is deprecated.
- Architectural changes:
- Use Caddy as a web proxy for automated SSL/TLS certificate generation:
- Nginx no longer listens to port 443 for https traffic
- The Caddy configuration file comes with a new ``caddyfile`` patch for much simpler SSL/TLS management.
- Configuration files for web proxies are no longer provided.
- Kubernetes deployment no longer requires setting up a custom Ingress resource or custom manager.
- Gunicorn and Whitenoise are replaced by uwsgi: this increases boostrap performance and makes it no longer necessary to mount media folders in the Nginx container.
- Replace memcached and rabbitmq by redis.
- Additional features:
- Make it possible to disable all plugins at once with ``plugins disable all``.
- Add ``tutor k8s wait`` command to wait for a pod to become ready
- Faster, more reliable static assets with local memory caching
- Deprecation: proxy files for Apache and Nginx are no longer provided out of the box.
- Removed plugin `{{ patch (...) }}` statements:
- "https-create", "k8s-ingress-rules", "k8s-ingress-tls-hosts": these are no longer necessary. Instead, declare your app in the "caddyfile" patch.
- "local-docker-compose-nginx-volumes": this patch was primarily used to serve media assets. The recommended is now to serve assets with uwsgi.
