- 💥[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.
Here, we upgrade the Open edX platform from Ironwood to Juniper. This
upgrade does not come with many feature changes, but there are many
technical improvements under the hood:
- Upgrade from Python 2.7 to 3.5
- Upgrade from Mongodb v3.2 to v3.6
- Upgrade Ruby to 2.5.7
We took the opportunity to completely rething the way locally running
platforms should be accessed for testing purposes. It is no longer
possible to access a running platform from http://localhost and
http://studio.localhost. Instead, users should access
http://local.overhang.io and https://studio.local.overhang.io. This
drastically simplifies internal communication between Docker containers.
To upgrade, users should simply run:
tutor local quickstart
For Kubernetes platform, the upgrade process is outlined when running:
tutor k8s upgrade --from=ironwood
When we were changing unit titles in the CMS, the changes were taking a
long time to be reflected in the LMS. That's because the cache key that
corresponds to the course structure was not being updated. It was the
responsibility of an asynchronous LMS celery worker to update this cache
entry. However, this was impossible in most cases because tasks
triggered in the CMS were only processed by CMS workers. That is, unless
we are using a custom celery router:
https://celery.readthedocs.io/en/latest/userguide/routing.html#routers
This is what edx-platform does in the devstack: certain CMS tasks are
forwarded both to CMS and to LMS workers. This is achieved by defining
the ALTERNATE_WORKER_QUEUES="lms" django setting in the CMS.
Adding this setting to Tutor solves the problem in production. However,
in development mode Open edX runs without workers
(`CELERY_ALWAYS_EAGER=True`). This means that the course structure will
not be automatically updated when running `tutor dev` commands, which is
a shame. The alternative is to define the
"block_structure.invalidate_cache_on_publish" waffle switch. This can be
done from the UI (in /admin/waffle/switch/add/) or by running:
tutor dev run lms ./manage.py lms waffle_switch block_structure.invalidate_cache_on_publish on --create
However, this flag seems to slow down access to the LMS for the first
user who tries to access the course after it has been updated.
Close #302
Video transcripts uploaded in the CMS were not visible in the LMS. This
was a symptom caused by the fact that the LMS and the CMS do not share
the same MEDIA_ROOT. We initially thought that data uploaded in the CMS
(such as transcripts) was stored in a shared data service, such as
mongodb. It is, in fact, not. This makes it even more important to run
an object storage service like minio for distributed services.
Close #229
This commit introduces many changes:
- a fully functional minio plugin for local installation
- an almost-functional native k8s deployment
- a new way to process configuration, better suited to plugins
There are still many things to do:
- get rid of all the TODOs
- get a fully functional minio plugin for k8s
- add documentation for pluginso
- ...
Login from localhost/studio.localhost was broken on Ironwood because the
session cookie was configured to be stored under the production domain
name. We fix this by setting the SESSION_COOKIE_DOMAIN to None: in the
edx-platform code, this corresponds to using the current request domain.
With the upgrade to Ironwood, studio login redirects to the LMS by
default. This breaks login from studio.localhost. So we activate SSO
login only when HTTPS is activated, which should happen only when the
domains are correctly configured.
In the future, we want to allow users to rely on third-party services
for data storage, such as hosted MySQL and such. To do so, we need to be
able to configure the host/port of these services, which we do here.
This is to address part of #114.
Replace all make commands by a single "tutor" binary. Environment and
data are all moved to ~/.tutor/local/share/tutor. We take the
opportunity to add a web UI and revamp the documentation.
This is a complete rewrite.
Close #121.
Close #147.
