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.
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`.
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.
- 💥[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.
Previously, it was not possible to override the docker registry for just
one or a few services. Setting the DOCKER_REGISTRY configuration
parameter would apply to all images. This was inconvenient. To resolve
this, we include the docker registry value in the DOCKER_IMAGE_*
configuration parameters. This allows users to override the docker
registry individually by defining the DOCKER_IMAGE_SERVICENAME
configuration parameter.
See https://discuss.overhang.io/t/kubernetes-ci-cd-pipeline/765/3
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
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/).
Because we are running a version of elasticsearch older than Methusalem,
the docker environment variables were not properly taken into account.
For instance, the cluster name and "mlockall" settings were incorrect,
as we could see by running:
$ tutor local run lms curl elasticsearch:9200 | grep cluster_name
...
"cluster_name" : "elasticsearch",
$ tutor local run lms curl elasticsearch:9200/_nodes/process?pretty | grep mlock
...
"mlockall" : false
See
https://discuss.overhang.io/t/elastic-container-is-not-being-removed/312/3
for discussion.
This fix also introduces a new tutor configuration setting to adjust the
elasticsearch heap size.
Having an identical "ironwood" tag for all releases is not practical, in
particular for breaking changes. Thus, docker images are now pinned to
the tutor version that they were build with.
Thus, we remove the -y/--yes options, which were kind of unintuitive,
and we add instead `-i/--interactive`. The quickstart commands remain
interactive by default, but can be silenced with `-I/--non-interactive`.
