Installing Tutor

Requirements

  • Supported OS: Tutor runs on any 64-bit, UNIX-based OS. It was also reported to work on Windows (with WSL 2).

  • Architecture: support for ARM64 is a work-in-progress. See this issue.

  • Required software:

Warning

Do not attempt to simply run apt-get install docker docker-compose on older Ubuntu platforms, such as 16.04 (Xenial), as you will get older versions of these utilities.

  • Ports 80 and 443 should be open. If other web services run on these ports, check the tutorial on how to setup a web proxy.

  • Hardware:

    • Minimum configuration: 4 GB RAM, 2 CPU, 8 GB disk space

    • Recommended configuration: 8 GB RAM, 4 CPU, 25 GB disk space

Note

On Mac OS, by default, containers are allocated 2 GB of RAM, which is not enough. You should follow these instructions from the official Docker documentation to allocate at least 4-5 GB to the Docker daemon. If the deployment fails because of insufficient memory during database migrations, check the relevant section in the troubleshooting guide.

Quickstart (1-click install)

  1. Install the latest stable release of Tutor from pip:

pip install "tutor[full]"

Or download the pre-compiled binary and place the tutor executable in your path:

sudo curl -L "https://github.com/overhangio/tutor/releases/download/v15.3.5/tutor-$(uname -s)_$(uname -m)" -o /usr/local/bin/tutor
sudo chmod 0755 /usr/local/bin/tutor

  1. Run tutor local launch

  2. You’re done!

That’s it?

Yes :) This is what happens when you run tutor local launch:

  1. You answer a few questions about the Configuration of your Open edX platform.

  2. Configuration files are generated from templates.

  3. Docker images are downloaded.

  4. Docker containers are provisioned.

  5. A full, production-ready Open edX platform (Nutmeg release) is run with docker-compose.

The whole procedure should require less than 10 minutes, on a server with good bandwidth. Note that your host environment will not be affected in any way, since everything runs inside docker containers. Root access is not even necessary.

If the launch installation method above somehow didn’t work for you, check out the Troubleshooting guide.

Download

Choose one of the installation methods below. If you install Tutor in different ways, you will end up with multiple tutor executables, which is going to be very confusing. At any time, you can check the path to your tutor executable by running which tutor.

Python package

pip install "tutor[full]"

Check the “tutor” package on Pypi: https://pypi.org/project/tutor. You will need Python >= 3.6 with pip and the libyaml development headers. On Ubuntu, these requirements can be installed by running:

sudo apt install python3 python3-pip libyaml-dev

Binary release

The latest binaries can be downloaded from https://github.com/overhangio/tutor/releases. From the command line:

sudo curl -L "https://github.com/overhangio/tutor/releases/download/v15.3.5/tutor-$(uname -s)_$(uname -m)" -o /usr/local/bin/tutor
sudo chmod 0755 /usr/local/bin/tutor

This is the simplest and recommended installation method for most people who do not have Python 3 on their machine. Note however that you will not be able to use custom plugins with this pre-compiled binary. The only plugins you can use with this approach are those that are already bundled with the binary: see the existing plugins.

Installing from source

To inspect the Tutor source code, install Tutor from the Github repository:

git clone https://github.com/overhangio/tutor
cd tutor
pip install -e .

Configuring DNS records

When running a server in production, it is necessary to define DNS records which will make it possible to access your Open edX platform by name in your browser. The precise procedure to create DNS records varies from one provider to the next and is beyond the scope of these docs. You should create a record of type A with a name equal to your LMS hostname (given by tutor config printvalue LMS_HOST) and a value that indicates the IP address of your server. Applications other than the LMS, such as the studio, ecommerce, etc. typically reside in subdomains of the LMS. Thus, you should also create a CNAME record to point all subdomains of the LMS to the LMS_HOST.

For instance, the demo Open edX server that runs at https://demo.openedx.overhang.io has the following DNS records:

demo.openedx 1800 IN A 172.105.89.208
*.demo.openedx 1800 IN CNAME demo.openedx.overhang.io.

Zero-click AWS installation

Tutor can be launched on Amazon Web Services very quickly with the official Tutor AMI. Shell access is not required, as all configuration will happen through the Tutor web user interface. For detailed installation instructions, we recommend watching the following video:

Upgrading

To upgrade Open edX or benefit from the latest features and bug fixes, you should simply upgrade Tutor. Start by upgrading the “tutor” package and its dependencies:

pip install --upgrade "tutor[full]"

Then run the launch command again. Depending on your deployment target, run one of:

tutor local launch # for local installations
tutor dev launch   # for local development installations
tutor k8s launch   # for Kubernetes installation

Upgrading with custom Docker images

If you run customised Docker images, you need to rebuild them before running launch:

tutor config save
tutor images build all # specify here the images that you need to build
tutor local launch

Upgrading to a new Open edX release

Major Open edX releases are published twice a year, in June and December, by the Open edX Build/Test/Release working group. When a new Open edX release comes out, Tutor gets a major version bump (see Versioning). Such an upgrade typically includes multiple breaking changes. Any upgrade is final because downgrading is not supported. Thus, when upgrading your platform from one major version to the next, it is strongly recommended to do the following:

  1. Read the changes listed in the CHANGELOG.md file. Breaking changes are identified by a “💥”.

  2. Perform a backup. On a local installation, this is typically done with:

    tutor local stop
sudo rsync -avr "$(tutor config printroot)"/ /tmp/tutor-backup/

  3. If you created custom plugins, make sure that they are compatible with the newer release.

  4. Test the new release in a sandboxed environment.

  5. If you are running edx-platform, or some other repository from a custom branch, then you should rebase (and test) your changes on top of the latest release tag (see Running a fork of edx-platform).

The process for upgrading from one major release to the next works similarly to any other upgrade, with the launch command (see above). The single difference is that if the launch command detects that your tutor environment was generated with an older release, it will perform a few release-specific upgrade steps. These extra upgrade steps will be performed just once. But they will be ignored if you updated your local environment (for instance: with tutor config save) before running launch. This situation typically occurs if you need to re-build some Docker images (see above). In such a case, you should make use of the upgrade command. For instance, to upgrade a local installation from Nutmeg to Olive and rebuild some Docker images, run:

tutor config save
tutor images build all # list the images that should be rebuilt here
tutor local upgrade --from=nutmeg
tutor local launch

Shell autocompletion

Tutor is built on top of Click, which is a great library for building command line interface (CLI) tools. As such, Tutor benefits from all Click features, including auto-completion. After installing Tutor, auto-completion can be enabled in bash by running:

_TUTOR_COMPLETE=bash_source tutor >> ~/.bashrc

If you are running zsh, run instead:

_TUTOR_COMPLETE=zsh_source tutor >> ~/.zshrc

After opening a new shell, you can test auto-completion by typing:

tutor <tab><tab>

Uninstallation

It is fairly easy to completely uninstall Tutor and to delete the Open edX platforms that are running locally.

First of all, stop any locally-running platform and remove all Tutor containers:

tutor local dc down --remove-orphans
tutor dev dc down --remove-orphans

Then, delete all data associated with your Open edX platform:

# WARNING: this step is irreversible
sudo rm -rf "$(tutor config printroot)"

Finally, uninstall Tutor itself:

# If you installed tutor from source
pip uninstall tutor

# If you downloaded the tutor binary
sudo rm /usr/local/bin/tutor

# Optionally, you may want to remove Tutor plugins installed.
# You can get a list of the installed plugins:
pip freeze | grep tutor
# You can then remove them using the following command:
pip uninstall <plugin-name>