This page describes how to install the edX Full Stack on a single Ubuntu 12.04 64-bit server from scratch. For other Full Stack installation instructions, see here.
The following server requirements will be fine for supporting hundreds of registered students on a single server.
Note: This will runs mysql, memcache, mongo, and all of the edX services (lms, studio, forums, ora/discern) on a single server. In production configurations we recommend that these services run on different servers and that a load balancer is added for redundancy. Setting up production configurations is beyond the scope of this wiki page.
For hosting in Amazon we recommend an m3.medium server, seehttps://aws.amazon.com/ec2/pricing
Community Ubuntu AMIs have 8GB on the root directory, make sure to expand it before installing.
WARNING:
These instructions will potentially destroy the server they are run on, you should only do them on a freshly installed virtual machine. But if you still want to have a try to re-install the Open edX stack on the same server, please see this article for some issues you may face and how to fix them.
By default ssh will only allow key based authentication. Please setup key based SSH logins or modify the configuration repo to allow for password based SSH logins before running ansible.
NOTES:
LET'S START:
Launch an Ubuntu 12.04 64-bit server and login to it as a user that has full sudo privileges. If you use EC2, use at least m1.large type with EBS and allocate ~50 GB to the root user.
Update your Ubuntu package sources
sudo apt-get update -y sudo apt-get upgrade -y sudo reboot |
Automated installation
You will run two scripts to accomplish the installation. Please read the contents of the scripts before running this to ensure you are aware of everything they will do: they are quite extensive. The scripts require that the running user can run commands as root via sudo.
wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/edx/configuration/master/util/install/ansible-bootstrap.sh -O - | sudo bash wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/edx/configuration/master/util/install/sandbox.sh -O - | bash |
If you want to install an Open edX release, such as Dogwood, just set the OPENEDX_RELEASE variable before running the scripts. For example:export OPENEDX_RELEASE=named-release/dogwood wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/edx/configuration/master/util/install/ansible-bootstrap.sh -O - | sudo bash wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/edx/configuration/$OPENEDX_RELEASE/util/install/sandbox.sh -O - | bash |
Manual installation
This will install the latest master versions of everything. If you want a specific version, such as a named release like Dogwood, use the automatic instructions, or read those shell scripts to learn how to install manually.
sudo apt-get update -y sudo apt-get install -y build-essential software-properties-common python-software-properties curl git-core libxml2-dev libxslt1-dev libfreetype6-dev python-pip python-apt python-dev libxmlsec1-dev swig libmysqlclient-dev sudo pip install --upgrade pip sudo pip install --upgrade virtualenv |
On the new server, clone the configuration repo:
cd /var/tmp git clone https://github.com/edx/configuration |
To allow password based SSH authentication, edit the common role inside of configuration/playbooks/roles/common_vars/defaults/main.yml and set COMMON_SSH_PASSWORD_AUTH to "yes"
Install the ansible requirements:
cd /var/tmp/configuration sudo pip install -r requirements.txt sudo pip install setuptools --upgrade |
Run the edx_sandbox.yml playbook in the configuration/playbooks directory
cd /var/tmp/configuration/playbooks && sudo ansible-playbook -c local ./edx_sandbox.yml -i "localhost," |
After installation connect your web browser to the following ports:
Some parts of Open edX are outdated. If you see a message suggesting that you update something manually, don't do it -- Open edX is probably relying on the outdated software remaining at that older version. Specifically:
do-release-upgrade to upgrade to that newer version.Don't do it.pip install --upgrade pip to install it. Don't do it.If you arbitrarily upgrade software in Open edX, things will break. Instead, you should submit a pull request to change the line in the Open edX project where that specific version of the software is defined. All pull requests need to be reviewed before they can be merged, and part of the review process will consist of testing Open edX with the updated software, identifying any breakages, and fixing them as part of the pull request.
You may want to override the default ports for Studio and lms-preview if you are setting up subdomains to connect to your sandbox. By default nginx will forward studio.* to the studio gunicorn process.
Example where preview.example.com, example.com and studio.example.com all point to the same server and you want to deploy the master branch of the edx-platform repo.
cd /var/tmp/configuration/playbooks/edx-east sudo ansible-playbook -c local --limit "localhost:127.0.0.1" ../edx_sandbox.yml \ -i "localhost," -e 'EDXAPP_PREVIEW_LMS_BASE=preview.example.com EDXAPP_LMS_BASE=example.com EDXAPP_LMS_PREVIEW_NGINX_PORT=80 EDXAPP_CMS_NGINX_PORT=80 EDXAPP_LMS_NGINX_PORT=80 edx_platform_version=master ' |
See edX-Managing-the-Full-Stack for how to manage and update the server once it is running