MITx Online Quick Start

You can use the configure_instance management command to perform a quick-start of a fresh MITx Online instance. This command takes care of a lot of the boilerplate required to set up an instance. It:

• Creates a superuser account (if you want)

• Creates the OAuth2 application record for edX (if you want, and optionally with an existing secret)

• Creates a set of courseware objects, including a DEDP program and courses with runs that match what ships with a standard devstack instance

• Creates a set of CMS pages for the courseware objects that it creates

• Sets up financial assistance appropriately

• Adds a couple of products in for the courses it creates

• Creates a learner account for the system

It does not:

• Run migrations

• Completely set up integration with devstack

In addition, there are a handful of tasks that you’ll need to perform afterwards:

• The CMS pages (course about pages and the financial assistance form) need to be reviewed for content.

• The financial assistance form will need to be published, and linked into the appropriate course.

• You may want to adjust the products that are created.

The configure_instance command has a few flags you can use to customize how it works. For more details on this, either run it with --help or read the configure_instance command documentation. (Do this especially if you’re using the command to reset your MITx Online instance - you can provide an existing OAuth client ID and secret.)

Performing a Quick Start

To quick-start your MITx Online instance:

1. Run the migrate command.

2. Configure Open edX using:

   1. Tutor (Recommended)

   2. Devstack (Deprecated)

configure_instance will prompt you to enter a password for the test learner account and will prompt you to enter account information for the superuser account. At the end, you’ll see your edX OAuth2 application credentials, which can then be plugged into Open edX (if you haven’t specified none for your platform).

Results

Running configure_instance will peform these tasks in order:

1. Runs createsuperuser to create the superuser account (unless disabled with --dont-create-superuser).

2. Creates the OAuth2 application record. (This is the one part of this that doesn’t rely on an existing management command.)

3. Runs configure_wagtail to set up the CMS.

4. Runs configure_tiers to add the DEDP program and configure financial assistance tiers and discounts.

5. Runs create_courseware_page to add a basic about page for the DEDP program (required for the financial assistance form).

6. Runs create_finaid_form to create a financial assistance form for the DEDP program.

7. Runs create_courseware twice to create two courses, each with a course run, that correspond to the demo courses in devstack. (Details below.)

8. Runs sync_course_run to sync the courses with the devstack instance.

9. Runs create_product twice to create two products for the courses.

10. Runs create_courseware_page twice to add course pages for the two courses. (These are marked as live.)

11. Runs create_user to create the learner account.

The courses that are created are:

Course	Readable ID	Run Tag	Price
Demonstration Course	course-v1:edX+DemoX	Demo_Course	$999
E2E Test Course	course-v1:edX+E2E-101	course	$999

The learner account that is created is:

• Username: testlearner

• Email: testlearner@mitxonline.odl.local

• Display Name (split in half for first/last names): Test learner

• Country Code: US

• Enrollments: course-v1:edX+DemoX+Demo_Course

The program that gets created is the standard DEDP program (program-v1:MITx+DEDP). The Demonstration Course is added to the DEDP program; E2E Test Course is not.

Notes

The steps that involve communication with edX may not work if your environment isn’t set up properly. In these cases, the attempts will be queued to be run later.

If you’ve set your platform to macos or linux, the command will do the first part of the Configure MITx Online as an OAuth provider for Open edX section in the Configure Open edX documentation.