Choosing a server for Quickstart version

[Michael Jacobs]

I had trouble with the Canvas Quickstart installation, so I am restarting from scratch. I want to make sure that I choose my server correctly.  Any advice? I have used both Vultr and Digital Ocean. 

What the guide says:

Automated Setup

If you are running macOS or Ubuntu, you can clone the repository and run the docker_dev_setup.sh script to automatically setup a development environment with Docker. It is recommended that you have at least 150GB of available hard drive space, 8GB of RAM, and a quad-core CPU to use this script.

./script/docker_dev_setup.sh

The doc/docker directory has more detailed information about using Docker for Canvas Development.

Manual Setup

This tutorial is targeting POSIX-based systems like macOS and Linux. This tutorial was written and tested using Ubuntu's latest LTS 18.04.1, macOS 10.14 Mojave, and Debian 9.5 Stretch. If you have a different system, consider setting up a server or virtual machine running the Ubuntu 18.04 LTS (Ubuntu 20.04 has a newer version of Ruby that isn't supported yet) . We'll assume you've either done so or are familiar with these working parts enough to do translations yourself.

[Nicolas Lopez]

Hi Mike, I've never used the Docker version, but for the manual setup we have many servers and those specs are fine even for virtual servers: Ubuntu 18.04, 8GB RAM, 4vCPUs.

If you have high concurrency, you can go to a 8vCPUs servers, and from then you should start separating components (database, redis, more app servers). During the pandemic we had a school with 1.000 active users (not concurrent, but very active due to the pandemic) hosted with 8GB RAM, 8vCPU, all the components on that very same server in Hetzer cloud without issues.

[Michael Jacobs]

Thanks for the information. That is good to know. It sounds like you had a production version running, but I only need to create a non-production version. I will just use it to see if my app can integrate with Canvas users. Has anyone out there created a streamlined version of Canvas to use just for testing? 

[Nicolas Lopez]

Well, the "production" version is just the same, but does not use Docker or Codespaces. The instructions are pretty detailed so you could give it a try.