Seeking Feedback: Improvements in Services Configuration

We are trying to collect top pain points for configuring Open edX, as we know many people had struggled to configure an Open edX instance. We have multiple Django settings files, then configuration files being used by Ansible, remote configurations stored in internal repositories, and on top of those we also have waffle flags. So a person with relatively less experience struggles to decide about the order of precedence. Also, there is ambiguity about which settings should be changed and which should be used with a default value.

We want to hear from you what are your top issues with this current system as we want to improve developers’ experience and also want to ease the process of configuring an Open edX instance.

For example, while upgrading edx-platform to Django 3.2 we had to roll-back because some private packages requirements were coming from a remote config stored in a private repo and we missed upgrading those packages.

Soban, I think what you said summed up the pain points I’ve experienced too. I’d only add:

More origins of configuration:

  • Command line switches or environmental variables set via:
    • Dockerfile
    • Continuous deployment system
  • Kubernetes configmap

Running into obsolete or undocumented configuration.

Thanks!
Phil

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I see that you are still referring to Ansible. The “Native” installation is no longer the recommended installation method for Open edX since the release of Maple.

Have you considered looking at Tutor?

https://docs.tutor.overhang.io/

I am not sure if your test case is more for a development installation or a production installation, but you could bring your point to the Build Test Release Working Group.

I agree @pshiu, we need to enable the Open edX to use environment variables.

I’ve created a topic in the Tutor forum: Only setting files getting values from environment variables.

I started with Open edX for about 3 months, and the biggest difficulty that I have is documentation. If we don’t have tutor Minio and S3 plugins, where we can see what setting we need to set, I was not able to configure Open edX to use S3 storage. I couldn’t find an Open edX documentation that works.

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I am from edX and collecting issues here to improve configurations