Tutor Quickstart (Developer)

Tutor Quickstart (Developer)#

Tags: developer quickstart

tutor main vs tutor local

tutor main should be used by developers when writing code for the master/main branches.

tutor local should be used by site operators to deploy an Open edX instance. See Tutor Quickstart (Operator) if you wish to deploy an Open edX instance.

Also, it is helpful to first watch the video on the What is Tutor? page before embarking on your Tutor journey.

Tutor was designed to make it easy for everyone to run the latest Open edX release, either for development or production environments. In this Quickstart we will walk you through how to set up Tutor Main for development on “master” (the latest code being developed for the next named release). This Quickstart walks through the basics of setting up Tutor for edx-platform development. For MFE development, you will want to continue on to Tutor Quickstart (MFE Development).

Requirements#

  • Supported OS: Tutor runs on any 64-bit, UNIX-based OS. It has also been reported to work on Windows (with WSL 2).

  • Architecture: Both AMD64 and ARM64 are supported.

  • Required software:

    • Docker: v24.0.5+ (with BuildKit 0.11+)

    • Docker Compose: v2.0.0+ (installed by default with Docker Desktop)

Warning

Do not attempt to simply run apt-get install docker docker-compose on older Ubuntu platforms, such as 16.04 (Xenial), as you will get older versions of these utilities.

  • Hardware:

    • Minimum configuration: 4 GB RAM, 2 CPUs, 8 GB disk space

    • Recommended configuration: 8 GB RAM, 4 CPUs, 25 GB disk space

Note

On Mac OS, by default, containers are allocated 2 GB of RAM, which is not enough. You should follow these instructions from the official Docker documentation to allocate at least 4-5 GB to the Docker daemon. If the deployment fails because of insufficient memory during database migrations, check the relevant section in the troubleshooting guide.

Set Up Tutor for Development#

  1. Fork the edx-platform GitHub repo and clone it locally. Then run git switch master to ensure you are on the master branch. If you already have a fork, first sync it to the current upstream version.

  2. Set up a new virtual environment for your Tutor environment and activate it:

    python -m venv /path/to/new/virtual/environment
source /path/to/new/virtual/environment/bin/activate

  3. Follow the instructions to install Tutor Main.

  4. Follow the instructions to have Tutor use your local fork. Continue to follow the instructions to build the images and launch Tutor using tutor dev launch.

  5. Next, review the common Tutor tasks for commands used to create superusers, import the “Open edX Demo Course”, and set themes.

Congratulations! You are now running Tutor, on the master branch, in dev mode!

See the Tutor tutorial about working on edx-platform for more details on what’s going on behind the scenes.

See also

What is Tutor?

Quick Start: First Open edX Pull Request

Tutor tutorial about working on edx-platform

Tutor Quickstart (MFE Development)

Maintenance chart

Review Date

Working Group Reviewer

Release

Test situation
Contents