Open edX quick install (in Docker containers)

This is a one-click install of Open edX, both for production and local development. As a bonus, this also builds a mobile Android app for your platform.

The deployment of a full-featured Open edX platform is a highly technical and complex project. Here, we greatly simplify it by replacing ansible deployment playbooks by Dockerfiles.

We made this project so that non-technical people could still install Open edX by themselves: knowing how to launch a server and ssh into it should be enough. But we also made sure that every step of the deploy process could be customized if you have the technical skills.

Quickstart

All you have to do is download the content of this repository, decompress and run:

make all

You will be asked some questions about the configuration of your Open edX platform. You will have to download a ~900 Mb docker image, but then you will have both an LMS and a CMS running behind a web server on port 80, ready for production. You should be able to access your platform at the address you gave during the configuration phase.

To be honest, I really don't like 1-click installs :-p They tend to hide much of the important details. So I strongly recommend you read the more detailed instructions below to understand what is going on exactly and to troubleshoot potential issues. Also, instructions are given to setup a local development environment.

Requirements

The only prerequisite for running this is Python and a working docker install. You will need both docker and docker-compose. Follow the instructions from the official documentation:

• Python: all versions >= 2.7 are supported.
• Docker install
• Docker compose install

Note that the production web server container will bind to port 80, so if you already have a web server running (Apache or Nginx, for instance), you should stop it.

You should be able to run Open edX on any platform that supports Docker and Python, including Mac OS and Windows. For now, only Ubuntu 16.04 was tested but we have no reason to believe the install would not work on a different OS.

At a minimum, the server running the containers should have 4 Gb of RAM.

Step-by-step install

Configure

make configure

This is the only non-automatic step in the install process. You will be asked various questions about your Open edX platform and appropriate configuration files will be generated. If you would like to automate this step then you should run make configure interactively once. After that, you will have a config.json file at the root of the repository. Just upload it to wherever you want to run Open edX and then run ./configure --silent instead of make configure. All values from config.json will be automatically loaded.

Download

make update

You will need to download the docker images from Docker Hub. Depending on your bandwidth, this might take a long time. Minor image updates will be incremental, and thus much faster.

Migrations and assets

make migrate
make migrate-forum
make assets

These commands should be run just once. They will create the database tables and generate static assets, such as images, stylesheets and Javascript dependencies.

If migrations are stopped with a Killed message, this certainly means the docker containers don't have enough RAM. See the troubleshooting section.

Running Open edX

make up

This will launch the various docker containers required for your Open edX platform. The LMS and the Studio will then be reachable at the domain name you specified during the configuration step.

Additional commands

Creating a new user with staff and admin rights

You will most certainly need to create a user to administer the platform. Just run:

USERNAME=yourusername EMAIL=user@email.com make create-staff-user

You will asked to set the user password interactively.

Importing the demo course

On a fresh install, your platform will not have a single course. To import the Open edX demo course, run:

make import-demo-course

Daemonizing

Note that in production, you will probably want to daemonize the services. Instead of make up, run:

make daemon

And then, to stop all services:

make stop

Logging

To view the logs from all containers use the docker-compose logs command:

docker-compose logs -f

To view the logs from just one container, for instance the web server:

docker-compose logs -f nginx

The last commands produce the logs since the creation of the containers, which can be a lot. Similar to a tail -f, you can run:

docker-compose logs --tail=0 -f

Debugging

Open a bash in the lms:

docker-compose run lms bash

Open a python shell in the lms or the cms:

make lms-shell
make cms-shell

Android app (beta)

The Android app for your platform can be easily built in just one command:

make android

If all goes well, the debuggable APK for your platform should then be available in ./data/android. To obtain a release APK, you will need to obtain credentials from the app store and add them to config/android/gradle.properties. Then run:

make android-release

Building the Android app for an Open edX platform is currently labeled as a beta feature because it was not fully tested yet. In particular, there is no easy mechanism for overriding the edX assets in the mobile app. This is still a work-in-progress.

For developers

In addition to running Open edX in production, you can use the docker containers for local development. This means you can hack on Open edX without setting up a Virtual Machine. Essentially, this replaces the devstack provided by edX.

(Note: containers are built on the Ginkgo release. If you are working on a different version of Open edX, you will have to rebuild the images with a different EDX_PLATFORM_VERSION argument. You may also want to change the EDX_PLATFORM_REPOSITORY argument to point to your own fork of edx-platform.)

First, configure your project such that the LMS and the CMS can be accessed locally:

make configure
...
Your website domain name for students (LMS) (default: "www.myopenedx.com"): localhost:8000
Your website domain name for teachers (CMS) (default: "studio.myopenedx.com"): localhost:8001
...

Standard devstack

Define development settings (on the host):

export EDX_PLATFORM_SETTINGS=universal.development

Then open an LMS shell:

make lms

You can then collect assets and run a local web server, as usual:

paver update_assets lms --settings=universal.development
./manage.py lms runserver 0.0.0.0:8000

Custom devstack

If you have one, you can point to a local version of edx-platform on your host machine:

export EDX_PLATFORM_PATH=/path/to/your/edx-platform

Note that you should use an absolute path here, not a relative path (e.g: /path/to/edx-platform and not ../edx-platform).

Point to your settings file:

export EDX_PLATFORM_SETTINGS=mysettings.py

In this example, you should have a mysettings.py file in edx-platform/lms/envs and edx-platform/cms/envs. Development settings file for docker are a bit different from stock devstack settings. For valid development settings files, check config/openedx/universal/lms/development.py and config/openedx/universal/cms/development.py

You are ready to go! Run:

make lms

Or:

make cms

This will open a shell in the LMS (or CMS) container. You can then run just any command you are used to. For example, install node requirements, collect assets and run a local server:

npm install
paver update_assets lms --settings=mysettings
./manage.py lms runserver 0.0.0.0:8000

Maintainers

The images are built, tagged and uploaded to Docker Hub in one command:

make dockerhub

Troubleshooting

"Running migrations... Killed!"

The LMS and CMS containers require at least 4 GB RAM, in particular to run the Open edX SQL migrations. On Docker for Mac, by default, containers are allocated at most 2 GB of RAM. On Mac OS, if the make all command dies after displaying "Running migrations", you most probably need to increase the allocated RAM. Follow these instructions from the official Docker documentation.

Build failed running pavelib.servers.lms: Subprocess return code: 1

python manage.py lms --settings=development print_setting STATIC_ROOT 2>/dev/null
...
Build failed running pavelib.servers.lms: Subprocess return code: 1`"

This might occur when you run a paver command. /dev/null eats the actual error, so you will have to run the command manually. Run make lms (or make cms) to open a bash session and then:

python manage.py lms --settings=development print_setting STATIC_ROOT

Of course, you should replace development with your own settings. The error produced should help you better understand what is happening.

ValueError: Unable to configure handler 'local'

ValueError: Unable to configure handler 'local': [Errno 2] No such file or directory

This will occur if you try to run a development environment without patching the LOGGING configuration, as indicated in the development section above. Maybe you correctly patched the development settings, but they are not taken into account? For instance, you might have correctly defined the EDX_PLATFORM_SETTINGS environment variable, but paver uses the devstack settings (which does not patch the LOGGING variable). This is because calling paver lms --settings=development or paver cms --settings=development ignores the --settings argument. Yes, it might be considered an edx-platform bug... Instead, you should run the update_assets and runserver commands, as explained above.

"TypeError: get_logger_config() got an unexpected keyword argument 'debug'"

This might occur when you try to run the latest version of edx-platform, and not a version close to gingko.master. It is no longer necessary to patch the LOGGING configuration in the latest edx-platform releases, as indicated in the development section above, so you should remove the call to get_logger_config altogether from your development settings.

Disclaimers & Warnings

This project is the follow-up of my work on an install from scratch of Open edX. It does not rely on any hack or complex deployment script. In particular, we do not use the Open edX Ansible deployment playbooks. That means that the folks at edX.org are not responsible for troubleshooting issues of this project. Please don't bother Ned ;-)

If you have a problem, feel free to open a Github issue that describes:

• the problem you are facing: this includes the exact error message, or a screenshot of the error.
• what action triggered the error: which command line instruction, which url you tried to access, etc.
• any error logs that you may find: you may want to take a look at the files in data/lms/logs, for instance.

Known missing features

SSL certificates

We have decided not to include the installation of SSL certificates in this project for running an Open edX platform on HTTPS. This is because there are too many different ways to generate SSL certificates. In particular, we should not assume that everyone uses Let's Encrypt certificates. If you decide to run your Open edX platform behind HTTPS, you will have to modify:

• the generated nginx configuration files
• the lms.env.json and cms.env.json files: look for the LMS_ROOT_URL and CMS_ROOT_URL variables and replace "http" by "https".

Discovery service, XQueue, edX Notes, Ecommerce, Notifier

Those extra services were considered low priority while developing this project. However, most of them should not be too hard to add to a standard install. If you need one or more of these services, feel free to let me know by opening an issue.

Contributing

Pull requests will be happily examined! However, we should be careful to keep the project lean and simple: both to use and to modify. Optional features should not make the user experience more complex. Instead, documentation on how to add the feature is preferred.

License

This work is licensed under the terms of the MIT License.