Tutor Analysis

This learnings from this analysis and others are being acted upon in a Tutor Adoption Initiative, which aims to make Tutor viable to fully replace for Devstack. Keep an eye on that project for the latest on Tutor enhancements & extensions.

Table of Contents

1 1 Overview
2 2 Rubric
3 3 Steps for Local Dev
4 4 Questions for Régis
5 5 Next Steps

1 Overview

An evaluation was made in March 2021 of the readiness of Tutor as a potential replacement of the Open edX devstack.

See https://openedx.atlassian.net/browse/ARCHBOM-1670

At this time, Tutor has enough gaps that it is not yet ready. However, next steps were also documented.

2 Rubric

Capability	Tutor	Open edX Devstack

Capability	Tutor	Open edX Devstack
Make edx-platform code change and see it via runserver	Works	Works
Run Specific Unit Tests	Works	Works
Run Quality tests	Works	Works
Make discovery change and see it via runserver	Doesn't work missing ES7 related changes.	Works
Run discovery unit tests	N/A	Works
Make an MFE code change and see it in the browser	No MFE Plugins right now.	Some MFEs are supported but not all
Run MFE tests	N/A	Works
Make a backend config change	Works but has a tutor specific layer to it	Works but is complicated by ansible
Run MFE outside devstack/tutor	Works once all the relevant host names are updated	Works

3 Steps for Local Dev

Tests were done with the version of Tutor in this pr: https://github.com/overhangio/tutor/pull/407

NOTE: Many steps will update the docker-compose.override.yml file. Here is what the final version looks like:

version: "3.7"
services:
  lms:
    volumes:
      - /home/feanil/src/edx-platform/:/openedx/edx-platform
      - /home/feanil/.local/share/tutor/volumes/edx-platform-venv/:/openedx/venv
  cms:
    volumes:
      - /home/feanil/src/edx-platform/:/openedx/edx-platform
      - /home/feanil/.local/share/tutor/volumes/edx-platform-venv/:/openedx/venv
  lms-worker:
    volumes:
      - /home/feanil/src/edx-platform/:/openedx/edx-platform
      - /home/feanil/.local/share/tutor/volumes/edx-platform-venv/:/openedx/venv
  cms-worker:
    volumes:
      - /home/feanil/src/edx-platform/:/openedx/edx-platform
      - /home/feanil/.local/share/tutor/volumes/edx-platform-venv/:/openedx/venv
  discovery:
    volumes:
      - /home/feanil/src/course-discovery/:/openedx/discovery
      - /home/feanil/.local/share/tutor/volumes/discovery-venv/:/openedx/venv

3.1 Steps for Setting up a branch version of Tutor

git clone git@github.com:feanil/tutor.git
cd tutor
git checkout feanil/more_resilient_warning_suppression
mkvirtualenv -p python3 tutor
pip install -e .

3.2 Setup to do edx-platform Dev

Setup for development per first section of https://docs.tutor.overhang.io/dev.html, summarized with the commands below:
tutor local quickstart tutor local stop tutor images build openedx-dev
Override source code mounts to point to local edx-platform code by following instructions in this section: https://docs.tutor.overhang.io/dev.html#override-docker-compose-volumes
- Note: See first line in each volumes section in example .yml file above.
Copy container’s venv to the host using the bindmount command.
Update docker-compose overrides file to mount the local venv into the container.