Open edX 2017 Installfest Pre-work

For the first time ever, we will be hosting a devstack installfest at the beginning of the Open edX hands-on tutorial day, May 23. However, rather than asking everyone to install their devstack on-site, using a million USB keys or saturating the local wifi, we think the best approach is to invite everyone to follow the documentation in advance, and then we would spend the time allotted in Madrid for troubleshooting, discussion, feedback, documentation fixes, testing, etc.

Start here

For newer Open edX developers, please follow these directions for installing the Ficus version of our Vagrant-based devstack. This is the best documented and supported environment for developing for Open edX.

Note that we highly recommend at least 8GB of RAM and a Linux or macOS machine. Windows is unsupported at this time.

Discussion and troubleshooting

We’ve set up the #openedx2017-devstack Slack channel (sign up for Slack at bit.ly/openedx-slack) for discussion of this effort, so feel free to ask questions there in advance.

We will focus our efforts on-site in Madrid on in-person troubleshooting, and we'll be on Slack then as well as before.

For the brave

For those who already have a working Vagrant environment, or have extensive experience setting it up, and are up to a bit of a challenge (in the name of making a better future!), we think this would be a good chance to get feedback on the Docker-based developer environment we have been working on. To get started, follow the instructions in the README at github.com/edx/devstack. Note that detailed documentation for this is very light and we are actively seeking feedback and contributions on this effort, particularly if there are workflows or use cases that are under-documented or that no longer work.

For the braver

For Open edX developers who also want to have real data for Insights, please follow these directions for installing the ficus.master version of the Vagrant Analyticstack.   The "analyticstack" is a superset of our Vagrant-based devstack that includes a Hadoop computing environment necessary to compute aggregates to be displayed by Insights.

Wrapping up

If everyone has a working devstack when they arrive on Tuesday morning, we’ll just drink coffee and talk about / get started on the cool ideas we have for the project day Friday!