Running jobs was previously done with "exec". This was because it
allowed us to avoid copying too much container specification information
from the docker-compose/deployments files to the jobs files. However,
this was limiting:
- In order to run a job, the corresponding container had to be running.
This was particularly painful in Kubernetes, where containers are
crashing as long as migrations are not correctly run.
- Containers in which we need to run jobs needed to be present in the
docker-compose/deployments files. This is unnecessary, for example when
mysql is disabled, or in the case of the certbot container.
Now, we create dedicated jobs files, both for local and k8s deployment.
This introduces a little redundancy, but not too much. Note that
dependent containers are not listed in the docker-compose.jobs.yml file,
so an actual platform is still supposed to be running when we launch the
jobs.
This also introduces a subtle change: now, jobs go through the container
entrypoint prior to running. This is probably a good thing, as it will
avoid forgetting about incorrect environment variables.
In k8s, we find ourselves interacting way too much with the kubectl
utility. Parsing output from the CLI is a pain. So we need to switch to
the native kubernetes client library.
The "Certificate" objects are no longer required. As a consequence, the
"k8s-ingress-certificates" has become useless and should be removed from
plugins.
The github-release is no longer maintained by aktau. We need to upgrade
because of Github authentication warnings. We also add a custom python
script for uploading assets to github. We thought it would be a simple
script, but instead we need to deal with deletion of existing assets and
releases, so we decide instead to keep relying on that 3rd-party script.
- [Feature] Make it easy to add custom translation strings to the
openedx Docker image
- [Improvement] Make it possible to rely on a different npm registry for
faster image building
Users can now add custom translation strings to a locale folder at build
time, very much in the same way as custom themes or requirements. This
is quite convenient, although is does require quite a bit of time to
rebuild the docker images.
During an incident at npmjs.org it was extremely difficult to pull
nodejs packages -- so we made it possible to pull from a custom
registry, deployed for instance with Verdaccio (https://verdaccio.org/).
- [Bugfix] Make sure all emails (including "password reset") are
properly saved to a local file in development mode (#315)
- [Improvement] Add `openedx-development-settings` patch to patch the
LMS and the CMS simultaneously in development
- [Bugfix] Fix missing celery tasks in the CMS
In development, emails sent from edx-platform were using the
"file_email" channel from edx-ace ("edX's automated communication
engine"). This channel was failing because it tries to write to a file
located in the /edx folder, which does not exist in tutor containers. To
fix this, we configure edx-ace to rely on the django email backend,
which itself is configured to send emails to a file in development. It
turns out that this backend was also configured to store emails in a
file located in the /edx folder, so we had to add the standard
EMAIL_FILE_PATH django setting to our development settings.
It was easier to reconfigure the django file email backend than the
edx-ace file_email channel because the output path of the latter cannot
be modified by a setting.
Note that this causes all emails to be stored in local files instead of
being sent to actual recipients. This is the default behaviour in Open
edX, and indeed in most default django apps (in development). This is a
good thing! If, for some reason, developers would like to try out email
sending during development, they should modify the EMAIL_BACKEND
setting and set it to 'django.core.mail.backends.smtp.EmailBackend'.
This is quite easy to achieve with the help of a plugin:
name: sendemailsindev
version: 0.1.0
patches:
openedx-development-settings: |
# actually send emails in dev
EMAIL_BACKEND = "django.core.mail.backends.smtp.EmailBackend"
Close #315
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
- [Feature] Add `encrypt` template filter to conveniently add
htpasswd-based authentication to nginx
- [Bugfix] Fix "missing tty" during init in cron jobs
Client-side translations are stored in "djangojs.js" files. Supposedly,
these files were properly compiled prior to the Ironwood release -- but
this is not the case, so we need to re-generate them.
Also, we need to re-generate the djangojs.js files for the custom,
downloaded locales. The assets collection settings are also fixed to
take into account the separate locale folder.
This step needs to happen prior to static assets collection, as the
djangojs files are collected to the staticfiles/ folder.
See these conversations:
https://discuss.overhang.io/t/localization-not-works-perfect/363https://discuss.openedx.org/t/localization-not-work-for-js-files/1671
tls renewal and generation was failing in cron jobs because of "The
input device is not a TTY" errors. This is because the "-it" docker
option does not work when a tty is not available.
- [Bugfix] Fix "Unable to resolve dependency" error during forum
initialisation
- [Feature] Add `settheme` command to easily assign a theme to a domain
name
- [Improvement] Modify nginx access logs to include request scheme and
server name (plugin developers should use the "tutor" log format)
- [Bugfix] Fix DNS resolution of restarted service
- [Feature] Restart multiple services with `local restart`
- [Feature] Make it possible to easily reload openedx gunicorn process
with `tutor local exec lms reload-gunicorn``
- [Improvement] Rename lms/cms_worker to lms/cms-worker in local
deployment
- [Improvement] Add the management plugin to the rabbitmq container
- [Improvement] Make it possible to run an Elasticsearch service on
https
When running "bundle exec rake search:initialize" in the forum, we were
getting the following error:
/openedx/ruby/lib/ruby/site_ruby/2.4.0/rubygems/resolver.rb:235:in `search_for': Unable to resolve dependency: user requested 'did_you_mean (= 1.1.0)' (Gem::UnsatisfiableDependencyError)
It happens this error suddently happened because rubygems-update was not
pinned to a specific version. v3.0.4 was working and v3.1.2 was not.
As it happens, we don't need rubygems-update, so we simply get rid of it
entirely.
To do so, we had to create a new log_format.
Plugin developers are strongly encouraged to start using this log format
by adding the `access_log /var/log/nginx/access.log tutor;` directive to
their extra nginx configurations.
In order to load this log format early, the `tutor.conf` config file had
to be renamed to something early in the alphabet... (hence starting by
an underscore) Older users would face an error on nginx reload, so older
"tutor.conf" files are automatically removed on config save.
Previously, a common error when restarting e.g: the lms or the cms was
that nginx redirected to the wrong container. For instance:
access studio.localhost
tutor local restart lms cms
access studio.localhost
In the second call to studio.localhost, we were frequently trying to
access the LMS, which resulted in a 400 error.
We solve this issue by setting a TTL of 10s on the nginx proxy name
resolution.
More docs:
http://nginx.org/en/docs/http/ngx_http_core_module.html#resolver
