The Open edX community can share knowledge and improvements more easily when most people use the same stable, consistent version of the Open edX codebase. To that end, edX is creating a series of named releases for Open edX, which are distinct from the weekly deployments to edx.org and have a longer release cycle (on the order of several months between each release). These named releases will be tested both by edX and by the Open edX community, and with each subsequent named release we will include instructions for how to upgrade from the previous named release.
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| Release Name | Release Date | Git Tag | Vagrant Box Torrents |
|---|---|---|---|
| Aspen | 2014-10-28 | named-release/aspen (previously | |
| Birch | 2015-02-24 | named-release/birch | |
| Cypress (future) |
Note that "release candidates" are not final yet, which is why they do not have a release date in this table. We encourage the Open edX community to test release candidates for several days and report any issues, so that they can be fixed before the new release is declared. In git, release candidates are branches, while releases are tags.
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In order to install devstack or fullstack, you must download a box file, which is basically a pre-packaged server that Vagrant unpacks onto your computer. The box files for Open edX are rather large (roughly 2.5GB3GB), and some people with slow or unreliable internet connections have reported difficultly downloading the entire file: their internet connection breaks before the entire file is downloaded, which results in a useless, corrupted file. To solve this problem, we're publishing these box files via BitTorrent, which is a file sharing protocol that allows people to download files in a peer-to-peer fashion. One of the benefits of BitTorrent is that files downloads can easily be paused and resumed, and if the internet connection breaks, no data is lost or corrupted: the download will resume right where it left off as soon as the computer reconnects to the internet. Devstack and fullstack use different boxes, so there are different BitTorrent download links for each.
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