Offline installation

[Madsn]

I'm evaluating edX in an offline setup, i.e. installing on a server in a LAN with no internet.

There are quite a few things I need to change for this to work, since edX very much expects to have an internet connection.

1. Loads in specific dependencies from CDN - Mathjax.js, possibly others?
2. Makes requests to youtube API, even if the video is not a youtube video but hosted on a webserver on the LAN
3. Some theme elements fetched directly from files.edx.org instead of included in the theme itself

I haven't used the ecommerce service or analytics pipeline - they may have similar external dependencies.

Would it make sense to bundle the external static dependencies (Mathjax, theme elements) with edx, make it more self-contained?

Is it possible to disable all youtube integration? If not, should it be possible?

Is it possible to completely disable user registration, and again - should it be? In an offline environment, e.g. company intranet, you might not want users to register themselves, but simply bulk create the accounts.

I'm asking these questions to determine if submitting pull requests would be worthwhile, or if I should expect to maintain my own fork.

Having a network with no internet connection may sound like an obscure use case, but I would argue the dependencies on external services and having a working internet connection are points of failure that aren't necessary.

[Ned Batchelder]

In general, we are open to making the platform more flexible.  This sounds like a number of different changes.  If you pursue them, definitely contribute them separately so that we don't have to try to merge an enormous set of changes.

It's good to start discussions about specific changes before doing a lot of work.  Other engineers will have opinions about how to proceed: http://edx.readthedocs.io/projects/edx-developer-guide/en/latest/process/overview.html

Thanks for pushing Open edX forward!

--Ned.

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[Uman Shahzad]

I would be personally really interested in seeing edX offline support, so if you do submit a PR for any related feature, please ping @UmanShahzad :)

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Uman

@OpenCraft

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[Régis Behmo]

Madsn,

I have done some work on getting rid of the dependency on Youtube by creating a self-hosted video service:
https://github.com/regisb/videofront
https://github.com/regisb/openedx-conference-2017

There are not (yet?) many users of Videofront that I know of, but in my experience it works quite well.

Régis

[Madsn]

Thanks for the input Regis

I'm simply hosting the videos as static files from an IIS webserver. Works well enough for our use case, but I will consider videofront if our needs change.

@Ned and Uman - We are still just in an evaluation phase and it will be at least several months before a decision is made, but it's valuable input for the decision makers to know that edx would most likely welcome contributions we made to make the platform more flexible and less dependent on external dependencies.