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
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.
Clarify a few variable names, make code more modular. Also, the Renderer
class now makes more sense as a singleton. We took the opportunity to
delete quite a lot of code.
This is for supporting json-based plugins. The great thing about this
change is that it allows us to easily print plugin version numbers in
`plugins list`.
The `dev` commands now rely on a different openedx-dev docker image.
This gives us multiple improvements:
- no more chown in base image
- faster chown in development
- mounted requirements volume in development
- fix static assets issues
- bundled ipdb/vim/... packages, which are convenient for development
Close #235
This has an impact on plugin hooks. Plugin hooks that needed to run
inside mysql-client now need to run inside mysql container. This
simplifies the deployment, as we no longer have an empty mysql-client
container sitting around.
When mysql is not enabled (ACTIVATE_MYSQL=False) the mysql container is
simply a mysql client.
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
- ...
Missing features:
- https certificates
- xqueue
- lms/cms workers
Moreover, we scalability issues due to the uploaded file storage in the
lms/cms. To address this issue we need to develop the MinIO plugin so
that it becomes compatible with Open edX.
Close #126#179#187
Configuration loading was overly complex. Here, we simplify it
drastically with reasonable defaults. Hacky additional variables are
unncessary now that we use custom jinja2 filters.
