How to view a VM installed open edx platform live on dev mode

Hi. I am currently using a tutor installed open edx platform and our instance is built through a virtual machine ubuntu server. It is also up and running in production mode with a certain domain.

The only catch on our work is the testing phase. Now that our server is up and running, when we want to implement new features, we can’t test it since we do not know how to run dev mode on a virtual machine. So we bought another domain and duplicated the instance and considered it our testing platform.

Although it consumes money, that’s what we currently do. But still, in every test we try, we always run tutor images build openedx which consumes a lot of time as well.

In other words, our process is so slow due to the fact that our testing server is also in production mode.

How can we test or view it live on dev mode if we are using it in a virtual machine?

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@Engr_James_Lusuegro Hi. One thing I had noticed during a similar endevour is this process needs a lot of RAM. Since Tutor is on a kind of emulation using containers (Docker) and the VM itself is another layer of emulation, we need a good configuration. Hope you have atleast 16GB RAM for the VM itself. In case you are low on RAM, make sure you have adequate SWAP space activated.

assuming that I do have enough RAM, how can I still test it live on dev mode?

Were you able to try

tutor dev launch

This will initiate setup of development instance.

I tried that. But how can I visit the dev-domain? I mean it says that my lms host will be local.overhang.io

Of course, in my local machine, when I visit the said LMS_HOST, it won’t work. I must be in the virtual machine to access the local.overhang.io url.

Great!

There are different ways to access the machine from outside.

Easiest perhaps is to use SSH port forwarding.

  1. From another machine on the same network, you can SSH into this VM and forward required ports to localhost.

  2. To facilitate access through dns, set up local dns entries with your hosts file to point local.overhang.io etc to the localhost ip in the machine from where you want to access the dev instance. In linux it would be /etc/hosts and in Windows it would be %SYSTEMROOT%\system32\drivers\etc\hosts

  3. In case you use windows host, you can use a good SSH client like Bitvise SSH Client to do this easily…