edX Ubuntu 12.04 Installation

This page describes how to install the edX Production Stack on a single Ubuntu 12.04 server from scratch. For AWS installation using Amazon Machine Images, see here

Hardware requirements

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.

• Ubuntu 12.04
• Minimum 2GB of memory, 4GB recommended for production servers
• At least one 2.00GHz CPU or EC2 compute unit
• Minimum 25GB of free disk, 50GB recommended for production servers

For hosting in Amazon we recommend an m1.medium server, see http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/pricing

Community Ubuntu AMIs have 8GB on the root directory, make sure to expand it before installing.

Installation instructions

WARNING: These instructions will potentially destroy the server they are run on, you should only do them on a virtual machine.

• Launch an Ubuntu 12.04 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 appropriate ~50 GB to the root user.

• Update your Ubuntu package sources

sudo apt-get update -y
sudo apt-get upgrade -y
reboot

• One step installation with vagrant

  Please read the contents of the script before running this to ensure you are aware of everything it will do; it is quite extensive. The script requires that the running user can run commands as root via sudo.

wget https://raw2.github.com/edx/configuration/master/util/install/vagrant.sh -O - | bash ```

• Manual installation (without vagrant)

  Perform the steps below

sudo apt-get install -y build-essential software-properties-common python-software-properties curl git-core libxml2-dev libxslt1-dev python-pip python-apt python-dev wget https://bitbucket.org/pypa/setuptools/raw/0.8/ez_setup.py -O - | sudo python sudo pip install --upgrade pip sudo pip install --upgrade virtualenv ```

  On the new server, clone the configuration repo:

  ```

cd /var/tmp git clone -b release https://github.com/edx/configuration ```

  Install the ansible requirements

  ```

cd /var/tmp/configuration sudo pip install -r requirements.txt ```

  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," ```

Note: If you are running on an older version of the configuration repo, use the variable 'edx_platform_commit' instead.

• Note: If you get npm Error: failed to fetch from registry: coffee-script, put

registry = "http://registry.npmjs.org/"

to /usr/share/npm/npmrc and retry the installation.

• If ansible stops at some point, look at log files. See locations of log files in the FAQ page.

After installation connect your web browser to the following ports:

• LMS - 80
• Studio - 18010

Overriding default web ports

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

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-Production-Stack for how to manage and update the server once it is running