Open edX Redwood Release - Developer and Operator Release Notes

Open edX Redwood Release - Developer and Operator Release Notes#

These are the Developer and Operator release notes for the Redwood release, the 18th community release of the Open edX Platform, spanning changes from October 10 2023 to May 09 2024. You can also review details about Open edX Platform Release Notes or learn more about the Open edX Platform.

Breaking Changes#

  • Deployers must ensure that their JWT_AUTH['JWT_PRIVATE_SIGNING_JWK'] Django setting in LMS contains the full complement of private key numbers.*

    • Background: In LMS, we switched from the pyjwkest library to PyJWT for signing JWTs. (pyjwkest is now unmaintained.) However, PyJWT has stricter requirements for the private key in JWT_PRIVATE_SIGNING_JWK. Before you upgrade to Redwood, you will need to update this key using a script. Otherwise, JWT signing will fail, and users will be unable to log in.

    • Steps:

      1. Locate JWT_PRIVATE_SIGNING_JWK in your deployment configuration.

      2. Check if the JSON contains all of the following params: p, q, dp, dq, and qi. If it does, you don’t need to do anything further. Otherwise, continue.

      3. In your edx-platform virtualenv, run python3 scripts/jwk-precompute-params.py and follow the prompts. (It will ask you to paste in the current JSON.)

      4. Update your config’s JWT_AUTH['JWT_PRIVATE_SIGNING_JWK'] with the output of the script.

      5. You may wish to compare the contents of the private key before and after running the script, and verify that the only changes it has made to the contents of the JSON are that the p, q, dp, dq, and qi params have been added. (Some or all may already have been present.)

    • Notes:

      1. This should be done while you are still running Quince—it is safe to do ahead of the upgrade, and should not have any visible effect at that time.

      2. This key must be handled very carefully. Anyone in possession of the key may impersonate users.

  • studio_home.enable_global_staff_optimization flag no longer works in Studio MFE

    • Background: This flag works for the legacy Studio Home, improving performance by adding an organization search bar. This flag does not work in the Studio Home MFE, as it is not needed within the MFE. The MFE already have a search bar and pagination, which improves performance for those home pages with lots of courses.

Learner & Instructor Experiences#

For in-depth information on new learner and instructor facing features in the Redwood release, please see the Open edX Redwood Release - Feature-Based Notes. Instructions on how to enable those features which need configuration are as follows.

Courseware Sidebar#

To enable the new Courseware Sidebar, set the courseware.enable_navigation_sidebar waffle flag to True.

Connect Teams in a course to Content Groups#

  1. Go to your site’s Django Admin Panel

  2. Enable the teams feature by turning on the waffle flag: teams.enable_teams_app

  3. Then, turn on the teams.content_groups_for_teams waffle flag for everyone or specific courses with a waffle flag course overrides

Make Sections available independently of the course outline#

Enable this feature flag: FEATURES["ENABLE_HIDE_FROM_TOC_UI"] = True to your deployment configurations to enable the feature system-wide.

Administrators & Operators#

Settings and Toggles#

Waffle flags added In Redwood:

Flags specific to the new Course Authoring MFE#

Every page in the new Course Authoring MFE can be toggled on and off individually. By default, these flags default to True when using Tutor.

Within the Tutor MFE plugin, additional flags must be set.

  • MFE_CONFIG["ENABLE_ASSETS_PAGE"]

  • MFE_CONFIG["ENABLE_HOME_PAGE_COURSE_API_V2"]

  • MFE_CONFIG["ENABLE_PROGRESS_GRAPH_SETTINGS"]

  • MFE_CONFIG["ENABLE_TAGGING_TAXONOMY_PAGES"]

Other Operator Changes#

  • The default minimum password length has been updated from 2 characters to 8 characters. (PR).

    • For users with an existing password, this change alone will not force them to update it. However if they reset their password or go to change it, they’ll have to conform to the new guidelines. If you would like to force people to update their password, you should take a look at the password_policy plugin and its settings

  • The Credentials service updated some requirements and may have implications for anyone who has a massive usersocialauth table.  This is because that table grows endlessly, and the migrations on the table caused by updating the social-auth-app-django package can run out of memory. If maintainers have migration failures on this upgrade, they should run the management command truncate_social_auth.

    • This will remove all entries from the usersocialauth table that haven’t been updated in 90 days, which makes the size of the table tractable for the dependency’s migration. This is harmless in the Credentials IDA.

  • The scripts related to user retirement across all services have been moved to the edx-platform repository. If you’ve been using the unsupported tubular repository to run retirement scripts you should update your code.

  • edx-platform and cs_comment_service Mongo Upgrades
  • django-social-auth-django application

    • In redwood.2 and later, the ‘django-social-auth-django application has been upgraded with a security fix. Operators should update to this version of the edx-platform if they are using auth via social media sites eg. “Login with Google, Facebook, etc.” features.

    • Feanil/backport django social auth.

Deprecations & Removals#

Flags and toggles removed in Redwood#

  • accomplishments_shared field is removed from payloads and settings

  • ENABLE_OPENBADGES, ENABLE_SEND_XBLOCK_EVENTS_OVER_BUS are no longer available for configuration in FEATURES

  • BADGING_BACKEND, BADGR_BASE_URL, BADGR_ISSUER_SLUG,

  • BADGR_USERNAME, BADGR_PASSWORD,

  • BADGR_TOKENS_CACHE_KEY, BADGR_TIMEOUT,

  • BADGR_ENABLE_NOTIFICATIONS, SEND_CERTIFICATE_REVOKED_SIGNAL,

  • blockstore.use_blockstore_app_api,

  • contentstore.enable_copy_paste_units,

  • course_apps.proctoring_settings_modal_view,

  • course_live.enable_big_blue_button,

  • course_live.enable_course_live,

  • courseware.learning_assistant,

  • discussions.enable_learners_stats,

  • discussions.enable_learners_tab_in_discussions_mfe,

  • discussions.enable_moderation_reason_codes,

  • discussions.enable_reported_content_email_notifications,

  • learner_recommendations.enable_course_about_page_recommendations,

  • learner_recommendations.enable_dashboard_recommendations,

  • student.enable_2u_recommendations,

  • student.enable_amplitude_recommendations,

  • student.enable_fallback_recommendations,

  • blockstore.use_blockstore_app_api are also not configurable anymore.

Developer Experience#

  • Asset Processing (webpack, collectstatic, etc.) using Paver Commands in edx-platform is now Deprecated and will not be available in Sumac

Researcher & Data Experiences#

Welcome to the Open edX Aspects documentation! is an analytics system for the Open edX platform, bringing actionable data about course and learner performance to instructors and site operators. It is primarily a Tutor plugin that ties together data from the Open edX learning management system and Studio using open source tools to aggregate and transform learning traces into data visualizations.

See the Configure Aspects for Production to learn about setting up Aspects for your production environment.

Known Issues#

Please refer to this board for known issues with Redwood.

Maintenance chart

Review Date

Working Group Reviewer

Release

Test situation

2024-06-01

Docs WG

Redwood

Pass
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