OpenEDX lilac.master issue

Development
1

Hi folks,

I am new to OpenEDX and I am taking over a developer who has been working on a project. He has left back some steps for me to set up OpenEDX devstack(GitHub - edx/devstack: Get up and running quickly to develop or extend Open edX services) for the project.

One of his step mentions that the development server we have has lilac.master installed on it and recommends me to use the same for my set up.

However, when I try to clone repositories using make dev.clone.https, I get an error while clone cs_comments_service and a few other repositories. I went to see the repository and I can see that it has become a public archive recently(GitHub - edx/cs_comments_service: Redirect information for cs_comments_service) and the README of that repo asks me to use(GitHub - openedx/cs_comments_service: server side of the comment service) instead. However, I don’t want to break any existing code on my development server.

Can someone please tell me if I am doing the right thing and how to port to another stable version correctly?

2

Lilac is a pretty old distribution :grimacing: (early 2021), so as the project progresses, old technology may become difficult to use. We no longer use Devstack.

You might be able to use Devstack from the Lilac branch, but I absolutely do not know if that will work nor will I be able to provide any help. GitHub - openedx-unsupported/devstack at open-release/lilac.master

I’m sorry that I can’t help any further. I hope you are able to get some help from your previous developer. When you get settled, I recommend seeing if you can upgrade to a newer version (we’re about to release Redwood, and we release twice per year).

3

Some of the comments in the post about the moved repos may be helpful – rather than changing repo URLs from edx to openedx, you may be able to reconfigure git to automatically swap out the URLs on checkout.

4

Thank you so much for your swift response. The previous developer is not able to provide much assistance at the moment. I have been trying to use devstack from Lilac branch and getting issues. I am going to try and see the posts @Tim_McCormack has mentioned.

Future plan of work is definitely going to be upgrading to a newer version. But I need to get my system up and running first.

5

Thanks for your response @Tim_McCormack. I have a couple of more questions and I request you to please see if you can give me your insights on them as I am really struggling here:

  1. I am trying to do a fresh installation using devstack on a Ubuntu VM. I have cloned devstack from the openedx URL instead of the edx URL this time and checked the lilac.master branch out (the previous developer has asked us to use the lilac.master branch because our development and production servers are using them currently). Seems like lilac.master branch still points to the edx URLs even on this repository(repo.sh). Therefore, I manually changed these files to point to the openedx versions for the repos which have been marked affected. I am not sure if this is a correct approach or not but this cloned all of the repos without throwing any git errors.

  2. Even after cloning, make dev.provision fails and gives the error TASK [demo : import demo course] followed by a long error message. This makes me wonder if I should stop trying to install this version and go for a newer one? If yes, which version should I go for?

  3. How should I go on about upgrading from lilac.master? Not just this time but how do I keep going to newer updates so that this does not happen with me or future developers anymore?

6

I can’t really provide much help on this, but for the moment, changing the URLs manually is probably your best bet.

The demo course issue might be related to a relatively recent change in the format of the demo course repo. Pinning the demo course import to an older commit may help.

7

Thanks for the response! I think I will be focusing on using tutor because I see that it has full support and is looking to replace devstack anyway.

8

I’ve pushed all the old open-release tags to edx/edx-platform and a few other repos that were affected, and hopefully that will unblock part of your work.

9

Thank you so much for your help and support! I will try it once again. I had started working on switching from devstack to tutor but I will give this a go once.