7. Installing Open edX Fullstack

This section describes how to install the Open edX Fullstack.

7.1. Overview

Open edX Fullstack is a Vagrant instance designed for deploying all Open edX services on a single server.

See the Vagrant documentation for more information.

7.2. Components

Open edX Fullstack includes the following edX components.

  • The Learning Management System (LMS)
  • edX Studio
  • XQueue, the queuing server that uses RabbitMQ for external graders
  • Discussion Forums
  • Open Response Assessor (ORA)
  • Discern, the machine-learning-based automated textual classification API service.
  • Ease, a library for the classification of textual content.

7.3. Knowledge Prerequisites

To use Fullstack, you should meeting the following knowledge requirements.

7.4. Software Prerequisites

To install and run Open edX Fullstack, you must first install the following software.

  • VirtualBox 4.3.12 or higher
  • Vagrant 1.6.5 or higher
  • A Network File System (NFS) client, if your operating system does not include one. Fullstack uses VirtualBox Guest Editions to share folders through NFS.

7.5. Install Open edX Fullstack

To install Open edX Fullstack directly from the command line, follow the instructions below.

Before beginning the installation, ensure that you have your local computer’s administrator’s password. The password is needed so that NFS can be set up to allow users to access code directories directly from your computer.

  1. Ensure the nfsd client is running.

  2. Create the fullstack directory and navigate to it in the command prompt.

    mkdir fullstack
    cd fullstack
    
  3. Download the fullstack Vagrant file.

    curl -L https://raw.githubusercontent.com/edx/configuration/master/vagrant/release/fullstack/Vagrantfile > Vagrantfile
    
  4. Install the Vagrant hostsupdater plugin.

    vagrant plugin install vagrant-hostsupdater
    
  5. Create the Fullstack virtual machine.

    vagrant up
    

    The first time you create the Fullstack virtual machine, Vagrant downloads the base box, which has a file size of about 4GB. If you destroy and recreate the virtual machine, Vagrant re-uses the box it downloaded. See Vagrant’s documentation on boxes for more information.

  6. When prompted, enter the administrator password for your local computer.

7.6. Browser Login to Open edX Fullstack

  1. In your browser, go to Go to preview.localhost, which is an alias entry for 192.168.33.10 that was created in your /etc/hosts file.

    The latest version of fullstack has the demo course pre-loaded and a set of dummy accounts.