Open edX Server Preparation

Introduction

The goal of the BluePlanetLife/edx-server-prep project is to provide a simple, but flexible way for anyone to prepare a server(s) for the installation of an instance of Open edX, especially when not using AWS or Vagrant..

The preparation is managed by Ansible and is intended for the use with edx/configuration.

Coverage

Installation types covered

Currently the playbook is created for the purpose of preparing an edx Ubuntu 12.04 64-bit single server installation as described on the edx/edx-platform wiki pages.

Now also supporting Backup and Restore playbooks. Note: For now this playbook only dumps and restores the MySQL containing Users and MongoDB containing Courses.

Functions and Options

• Prepare Configuration Files
  • Transfer the configuration from a local folder
  • Clone configuration from a git repository
• Select an Open edX version
  • release
  • master
  • named-release/birch (Named-Releases)
• System Settings
  • Time Zone
  • Locale
• Additional Packages
  • htop
• Backup and Restore
  • Backup to the the machine executing the playbook (can be set to localhost)
  • Restore the backup just created
  • Your previous backups will remain in the files/backups folder

Requirements

• Ansible installed locally
• Remote (or VM) Ubuntu 12.04 64-bit Server to prepare
• Further requirements for Open edX

Installation & Customization

1. Prepare your workstation

• install virtualenv
• activate that virtualenv
• pip install ansible within that virtualenv

2. Clone
3. Add an IP address to the hosts file, underneath [all].

• Use ip address of vagrant box if using vagrant

4. Edit the file you want to use

• Edit user: ubuntu to match your user for SSH. Use vagrant if using vagrant.
• Define the hosts you want to have prepared (default: all)

5. Edit Playbook and System Variables in the 1. playbook (var: default)

• Use a local configuration folder (local_conf: False)
• Name of the local configuration folder (config_folder: configuration)
• Repository for remote configuration (config_repo: git@github.com:edx/configuration.git)
• Open edX version to clone from GitHub (openedx_version: named-release/birch). You may want named-release/aspen
• Select your time zone (timezone: Europe/Zurich)
• Set your locale settings (locale: en_GB.UTF-8)

Running the playbook

(More information on Ansible Playbooks)

Open your command line interface and navigate to the cloned repository. After customizing your hosts and 1-ubuntu1204_single_server.yml file, run the following command:

ansible-playbook -i hosts 1-ubuntu1204_single_server.yml

If using vagrant, make sure vagrant user has permissions to write to /home/vagrant/.ansible folder.

sudo chown -R vagrant:vagrant /home/vagrant/.ansible

Backup and Restore

After customizing your hosts and backup/restore files, run the following command for a backup:

ansible-playbook -i hosts 98-db-backup.yml

or for Restore that backup

ansible-playbook -i hosts 99-db-restore.yml

! Custom Configuration ! In case you have a customized configuration, make sure to place it one the same folder level as this folder:

your_repos_folder   
|--configuration-custom
|--preparation
|--...

Finally you can run the edx_sandbox.yml playbook, according to the wiki pages of edx/configuration: cd /var/tmp/configuration/playbooks && sudo ansible-playbook -c local ./edx_sandbox.yml -i "localhost,"

Future Plans

This is a first script for simple and basic use and preparation. Further playbooks are planned for preparing different scenarios and constellations of Open edX instances.

Next up: Split Server Preparation For setting up two servers:

• App server
• DB server

Format

Scripts follow the official Ansible Coding Conventions as well as the Ansible variable convention and overriding defaults, defined by and used for Open edX.