WARNING: THIS INSTALLATION METHOD IS DEPRECATED and will not work for Open edX versions released after December 20, 2021. The Maple release and all future releases are installed using Tutor, a Docker-based application.

Summary

Updated July 29, 2021 for the Open edX Lilac release.

This installation method only works for Open edX releases Lilac and older. It was originally based upon Ned Batchelder’s “Native Open edX Ubuntu 16.04 64 bit Installation” method but I’ve occasionally updated the steps to account for changes due to subsequent named releases of the platform. This article is currently updated for the Lilac release of Open edX running on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS. The first time I installed an instance of Open edX, in many ways I felt like I was on the outside looking in. The project documentation that exists is very good, but, it assumes an extensive knowledge base that, at the time, I lacked. This article attempts to fill in some of the gaps in that knowledge base, and hopefully, make the Open edX platform more accessible.

This is a fully automated script to stand up a single-server full-stack production-ready instance of Open edX running on an Amazon Web Services (AWS) EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud — aka virtual server). The script installs the following Open edX modules: