Site configurations not working?

Site Operators
1

I am using ironwood.master on a brand new instance.

My Nginx configuration file allows me to answer to two specific domain names. Without revealing them, let’s call them courses.domain.ca and courses.domaintest.ca

I created entries in Django Admin for the following sites:
domain.ca
domaintest.ca

I created site configurations in Django Admin for the following sites:
domain.ca
domaintest.ca

I enabled the site configurations for each domain. I even went as far as recompiling my assets and restarting my services. I even restarted Nginx. I can access both courses.domain.ca and courses.domaintest.ca. And when I authenticate, I stay on these domains.

All I want right now is for PLATFORM_NAME to display something different than “Your Platform Name Here” in index_overlay.html on the LMS home page.

For example, in the site configuration for “domain.ca”, I put the following:

{
“PLATFORM_NAME”:“Online More University”,
“platform_name”:“Online More University”
}

Nothing happens. I still get “Your Platform Name Here”. I tried the same for the site configuration of “domaintest.ca”. Same results.

Am I missing something? And if so, what? Is it in a Django settings? Is it in Nginx?

I have been following the documentation here:
https://edx.readthedocs.io/projects/edx-installing-configuring-and-running/en/open-release-ironwood.master/configuration/sites/index.html

I have been scratching my head for days now… Any help would be greatly appreciated. I just can’t find what I am doing wrong…

2

I found something and I absolutely need someone to confirm my suspicion.

This only works if there is an A record for the domain name (site)?

And when I changed PLATFORM_NAME to something else in the site configuration, it displayed an alt image (based on the PLATFORM_NAME) in the upper left corner but it didn’t change the text in index_overlay.html ???

Are there more surprises I need to be made aware of?

Has anyone really been using this in a production environment? If so, can you get in touch with me please? I would like to discuss what you have done at the DNS level and at the nginx configuration level. Thanks for your help.

3

If your LMS domain is courses.domain.ca, then your Site domain needs to be courses.domain.ca. A site domain of domain.ca won’t match, and so the site configuration won’t be used.

So we have a site configuration entry for studio.domain.ca as well, with a lot of the same settings as the LMS site configuration.

What matters is that the fully-qualified domain of the LMS that the learner visits matches the Site domain for the site configuration.

cf Django “sites” framework

2 Likes
4

Hi @jill,

After lots of trials and errors, I did find out that the Site domain had to be courses.domain.ca which is contrary to what the documentation says…

Enter the domain name for the site. This is the domain name in the URL for the site. For example, myuniversity.edu .

It should clearly states the fully qualified domain name in order not to confuse the host part of a FQDN with the domain part of a FQDN.

host and domain are two different things for old sysadmin / devops like me :wink:

Give an example like lms.myuniversity.edu instead of just myuniversity.edu. Not everyone will understand that the last one is not just a domain name unlike the previous which is clearly, at least for me, a site running off a domain.

Thanks for confirming what took me a long time to figure out. I really appreciate it.

1 Like
5

My pleasure, @sambapete!

Thanks for asking this question on the forum, I’m sure it will help others too.