Hi everyone,
Quite a few of you reported that tutor images build mfe started failing with apt 404 and “Release file expired” errors (see this thread). The cause is that Debian 11 “bullseye” reached end of life on 31 August 2026 and its security repository is no longer served. The MFE Dockerfile built on node:*-bullseye-slim, so the base stage broke for everyone rebuilding the image, with or without --no-cache.
The fix (switching the base image to Debian 12 “bookworm”) shipped in tutor-mfe v22.1.0 for Verawood. @tutor-maintainers normally don’t backport fixes to older releases, but since this one blocks so many people from building at all, and the change is tiny, we made an exception and backported it to every supported line:
| Open edX release | tutor-mfe version | PR | PyPI |
|---|---|---|---|
| Redwood | v18.1.1 | #347 | tutor-mfe 18.1.1 |
| Sumac | v19.0.1 | #344 | tutor-mfe 19.0.1 |
| Teak | v20.1.1 | #346 | tutor-mfe 20.1.1 |
| Ulmo | v21.0.2 | #345 | tutor-mfe 21.0.2 |
| Verawood | v22.1.0 | #340 | tutor-mfe 22.1.0 |
Prebuilt overhangio/openedx-mfe images for each of these versions (including the -indigo variants) are on Docker Hub too, so if you don’t customize the MFE image you don’t need to build anything.
How to upgrade
Upgrade the plugin within your current major version, for example on Sumac:
pip install --upgrade "tutor-mfe>=19,<20"
tutor config save
Then either pull the new prebuilt image (tutor images pull mfe) or, if you build your own, run tutor images build mfe as usual.
What changed
Only the build stage and the -dev images were affected. The production image is Caddy plus static files, so nothing changes at runtime for anyone already running a prebuilt image. The backports change the FROM line to bookworm-slim (same Node version as before), replace the python apt package with python3 python-is-python3 since bookworm has no python2, and bump the version. Nothing else was touched.
Thanks to everyone who reported and helped narrow this down. If you still hit build issues after upgrading, please reply here.