devstack

Get up and running quickly with edX services.

This project is meant to replace the traditional Vagrant VM "devstack" with a multi-container approach driven by Docker Compose. You should run any Make targets described below on your local machine, not from within a VM.

Getting Started

All of the services can be run by following the steps below.

1. Run the provision command, if you haven't already, to configure the various services with super-users (for development without the auth service) and tenants (for multi-tenancy).

   The username and password for the superusers are both "edx". You can access the services directly via Django admin at the /admin path.

   $ make devstack.provision
   

2. Start the services.

   $ make devstack.start
   

After the services have started, if you need shell access to one of the services, run make devstack.open.<service>.

$ make devstack.open.discovery

Loopback Alias

Containers making requests to the LMS and Studio must communicate with ports exposed on the host system by the Vagrant VM. (This assumes that the LMS and Studio are still running in the traditional Vagrant-based devstack.)

This is fine on Linux, but doesn't work out of the box on OS X. Attempting to access localhost on a container will result in talking to the Docker for Mac HyperKit VM, not the host machine.

While it's true that you can get this to work by accessing your Mac's external IP from your containers, this isn't ideal because it won't work if you have no network access on your host. Your external IP also changes as you switch networks, meaning you'd have to change the IP accessed by your containers every time you changed networks.

A better solution, borrowed from the Docker forums, is to give your host a fixed address by creating a loopback alias. This is done for you by the devstack.start target.

The result is a fixed IP which your containers can use to access ports on your host machine. Note that the underlying script uses sudo; adding IP addresses requires root access. Also note that the alias will not survive a host reboot, which is why the devstack.start target always attempts to set up the loopback for you.

Part of the loopback alias setup includes adding a line to the /etc/hosts file on your machine. If you want to stop using devstack, you can clean this up by opening your /etc/hosts file and removing this line:

10.254.254.254 docker.host