Open edX: Getting Started

25 Sep 2014

I know nothing about edX and want an instance to start playing with right away. What’s the easiest thing to do?

Set up the Amazon AMI. You can have an instance to work with inside an hour.

Amazon’s hosting is pretty expensive, but you’ll be up and running fast.

OK, so USD$1500/year for Amazon hosting is pretty insane. What do I do?

Install edX using the Ubuntu 12.04 instructions below. You have a few options when looking for a machine to run it on:

• Find a VPS host. In the US, I’ve had great experiences with RamNode. I rent a VPS from them with similar specs to the Amazon AMI and (as of Sep 2014) it’s costing USD$120/year.
• In Australia, I’m happy with Ransom IT, though you either have to buy their largest services or negotiate something with the owner. That comes to $480/year.
  • You can trim down edX’s memory usage without too much trouble. This lets you fit into smaller and cheaper VPSes.
• You could also buy a really nice desktop computer for $500-$1000 and run edX directly off it. This assumes that you have a fast Internet connection and your admins don’t mind or don’t know that you have a public-facing server within your office.

(Obviously, these prices will change. USD$1500/year is what Australia-region Amazon hosting would cost us once bandwidth and storage are factored in. Both Amazon and VPS hosts are continually dropping their prices, so do your own research, slacker!)

You can run the Production edX stack on your dev machine/laptop, but it uses 4GB of RAM and isn’t at all convenient for development. It runs tolerably with 2GB of RAM. You probably want the Developer Stack instead.