Open edX Docker

France Université Numérique introduces an alternative Docker approach to install a complete and customized version of Open edX.

The idea is to handcraft a Dockerfile, in order to make the project simpler, more flexible and fully operable by developers.

We hope this kind of Docker configuration can soon be included in the edx-platform repository itself.

Approach

This project builds a docker image that is ready for production.

At France Université Numérique, we are deploying Open edX Docker to OpenShift, for many customers and in multiple environments using Arnold:

The Open edX settings were polished to unlock powerful configuration management features: sensible defaults, flexible overrides using YAML files and/or environment variables, secure credentials using Ansible Vault and PGP keys,
We focused on a best practice installation of edxapp, the core Open edX application. You can build you own image by adding specific Xblocks or Django apps in a Dockerfile inheriting from this one (see https://github.com/openfun/fonzie for an example).

Docker compose is only used for development purposes so that we can code locally and see our changes immediately:

sources and configuration files are mounted from the host,
the Docker CMD launches Django's development server instead of gunicorn,
ports are opened on the application containers to allow bypassing nginx.

Docker compose also allows us to run a complete project in development, including database services which in production are not run on Docker. See the docker-compose file for details on each service:

mysql: the SQL database used to structure and persist the application data,
mongodb: the no-SQL database used to store course content,
memcached: the cache engine,
lms: the Django web application used by learners,
cms: the Django web application used by teachers,
forum: the Ruby web application serving the discussion forum, TODO
ecommerce: the Django web application used for payments, TODO
xqueue: the interface for the LMS to communicate with external grader services, TODO
nginx: the front end web server configured to serve static/media files and proxy other requests to Django.

Alternative projects

If what you're looking for is a quick 1-click installation of the complete Open edX stack, you may take a look at Régis Behmo's work here.

Getting started

Make sure you have a recent version of Docker and Docker Compose installed on your laptop:

$ docker -v
  Docker version 17.12.0-ce, build c97c6d6

$ docker-compose --version
  docker-compose version 1.17.1, build 6d101fb

⚠️ Docker Compose version 1.19 is not supported because of a bug (see docker/compose#5686). Please downgrade to 1.18 or upgrade to a higher version.

Start the full project by running:

$ make bootstrap

You should now be able to view the web applications:

LMS served by nginx at: http://localhost:8073
CMS served by nginx at: http://localhost:8083

See other available commands by running:

$ make --help

Developer guide

If you intend to work on edx-platform or its configuration, you'll first need to clone the git repository locally and compile static files in local directories that are mounted as docker volumes in the target container:

$ make clone
$ make dev-assets

Tip: you will need to update assets at every new edx-platform checkout.

Now you can start services development server via:

$ make dev

You should be able to view the web applications:

LMS served by runserver at: http://localhost:8072
CMS served by runserver at: http://localhost:8082

Hacking with themes

To work on a particular theme, we invite you to use the paver watch_assets command; e.g.:

$ make dev-watch

Troubleshooting: if the command above raises the following error:

OSError: inotify watch limit reached

Then you will need to increase the host's fs.inotify.max_user_watches kernel setting (for reference, see https://unix.stackexchange.com/a/13757):

# /etc/sysctl.conf (debian based)
fs.inotify.max_user_watches=524288

Docker images

The plan is to prepare several flavors of images, the docker files and settings of which are living in their own branch (e.g. ginkgo.1, eucalyptus-funwb, dogwood-funmooc,...)

Branch names on the current repository are of the form: {edx-version}[-{fork-name}] Two words separated by a dash, the second word being optional:

edx-version: name of the upstream edx-platform version (e.g. ginkgo.1),
fork-name: name of the specific project fork, if any (e.g. funwb).

We are pushing to DockerHub only images that are the result of a tag respecting the pattern: {branch-name}-x.y.z

Here are some valid examples:

dogwood.3-1.0.3
dogwood.2-funmooc-17.6.1
eucalyptus-funwb-2.3.19

Each time we push to DockerHub the new version of an image, we also update the latest version so that our latest images are always up-to-date:

eucalyptus-funwb-2.3.19 -> eucalyptus-funwb-latest
eucalyptus-funwb-2.3.19-dev -> eucalyptus-funwb-latest-dev

License

The code in this repository is licensed under the GNU AGPL-3.0 terms unless otherwise noted.

Please see LICENSE for details.

ijlale/openedx-docker