Quick Start: First Open edX Pull Request#
Welcome to the Quickstart guide for new Open edX contributors.
This tutorial is focused on teaching you how to make a noticeable change to the platform equivalent to a “hello world” exercise.
By the end of this tutorial, you will have completed all the steps necessary to begin contributing to the Open edX project.
These include:
Setting up your development environment;
Making your first commit;
Submitting your first pull request (PR);
We assume you are comfortable with the command line, and understand the basics of using Git, GitHub, Docker, and python basics.
Before you start#
System Requirements
For the smoothest experience, we recommend that your computer has at least 16 GB of RAM, 2 CPUs, and at least 50 GB of Free disk space.
This tutorial is written for users of macOS or Linux. It has been tested with both common 64-bit processor families: x86-64 (a.k.a. Intel-64) and ARM-64 (used in newer Apple laptops, including M1, M2, etc.). Additionally, you will need to have the following installed or configured, and know at least the basics of using them, before proceeding:
Git (see GitHub’s set up Git guide)
-
Additionally, we strongly recommend setting up 2-factor authentication.
Your favorite code editor (our team uses VSCode, Emacs for Mac OS X, NeoVim, MacVim, and others)
Install Docker#
Install Docker Desktop and launch it. You can check that it is running correctly with:
docker run --rm hello-world
You should see a message that starts with the following:
Hello from Docker!
This message shows that your installation appears to be working correctly.
On macOS, by default, Docker allocates at most 2 GB of RAM to containers; the Open edX software requires at least 8 GB. macOS users should follow these instructions from the official Docker documentation to allocate at least 8 GB to the Docker daemon.
Installing Tutor Main#
Tutor main is the best solution for using Tutor as your development environment and tracking the bleeding edge of the Open edX platform code.
Follow the official instructions for installing Tutor Main.
Use Virtual Environments
The Tutor documents will recommend this as well, but please do yourself the favor of using python virtual enviroments. Doing so will make managing multiple repositories and dependency versions much easier.
Working with a fork#
At this point you should have a Tutor installation that is suitable for development, but you’re still missing a practical way to edit the code, test it locally, and then contribute it back.
For the purposes of this tutorial, you’ll be modifying code in the
edx-platform repository, where the Open edX backend code lives. Let’s
start by creating your own personal “fork” of it. A “fork” is essentially your
own copy of the repository. See here to learn more about forks.
Forking edx-platform#
Assuming you’re logged in to GitHub, forking a repository is easy. Visit the
edx-platform repository at this URL:
Now, click the Fork button on the top right, and in the next
screen, select your personal account as the owner. After you click the
Create fork button, you’ll be taken to your own version of the
edx-platform repository.
Cloning your fork#
Your edx-platform currently only exists on the GitHub servers. You’ll now
create a local copy of it (a “clone”).
First, fetch the git URL of your fork. Navigate to its web page (to which you were taken after creation), click on the Code button, select the HTTPS tab, and copy the URL given. It should look like this:
https://github.com:<your_github_username>/edx-platform.git
Now, from the same top level directory you created above, clone the repository as follows:
cd ~/openedx
git clone https://github.com:<your_github_username>/edx-platform.git
You’ll now have an edx-platform directory containing a local clone of your
fork. It is not yet wired into your Tutor development environment, though.
This is what you’ll do next.
Mounting edx-platform#
To have Tutor run your local fork of edx-platform, you have to tell it to do so on start up. It is a simple CLI parameter that points Tutor to the directory where the code lives.
To set up your local enviroment to update edx-platform, follow the official instructions
From this point on, whatever changes you make to the code in your clone should be visible in your local LMS instance immediately.
Working with an MFE#
Most of the Open edX platform’s frontends have migrated from backend Django templates to microfrontends based on the React framework (MFEs). If you are interested in updating frontend code, MFEs are probably where you want to focus. There are different ways of configuring your development environment, but a common one is to use Tutor to serve the backend services and run your MFE locally using npm dev start.
To run MFEs in Tutor requires enabling a plugin, Tutor MFE.
Start by verifying that the mfe plugin is installed and enabled
(tutor-main) $ tutor plugins list
NAME STATUS VERSION
discovery installed 19.0.0
forum installed 19.0.0
indigo ✅ enabled 19.0.1
jupyter installed 19.0.0
mfe ✅ enabled 19.0.0
If mfe isn’t enabled run the following command to do so
(tutor-main) $ tutor plugins enable mfe
(tutor-main) $ tutor dev stop
(tutor-main) $ tutor dev launch
Once Tutor has restarted with the mfe plugin enabled you will see a few more URLs listed.
http://apps.local.openedx.io:1984/communications
http://apps.local.openedx.io:1990/learner-record
http://apps.local.openedx.io:1993/ora-grading
http://apps.local.openedx.io:1994/gradebook
http://apps.local.openedx.io:1995/profile
http://apps.local.openedx.io:1996/learner-dashboard
http://apps.local.openedx.io:1997/account
http://apps.local.openedx.io:2000/learning
http://apps.local.openedx.io:2002/discussions
These ports and paths are to specific MFEs made available via the MFE plugin.
In order to develop locally, you will need to fork and clone the MFE repository as you did for edx-platform, bind mount the directory, stop the Tutor-hosted MFE and start a local npm dev server. Let’s do so with the Learner Dashboard MFE.
First, you should verify that the learner dashboard is working
correctly after you have installed the MFE plugin. Assuming
everything is configured in the standard way, your URL should be
http://apps.local.openedx.io:1996/learner-dashboard/
Follow the same, fork, clone workflow described above and clone the
learner-dashboard
https://github.com/openedx/frontend-app-learner-dashboard
repository locally.
Add a tutor mount for your cloned directory.
(tutor-main) $ tutor mounts add /home/git/frontend-app-learner-dashboard
Next, ensure that the learner-dashboard MFE is stopped
(tutor-main) $ tutor dev stop learner-dashboard
Reloading the learner dashboard page in the browser should now yield an error.
Now its time to replace the default Tutor-hosted learner-dashboard with a local version. That version will use a dev config file to connect to the Tutor-hosted backend and to bind to the expected port.
Local MFE Support and npm dev Profiles
Not every MFE currently has an npm run dev command that will
work with Tutor, though it is possible to create one if that is the
case for the MFE you are developing, , using an existing one
as a template.
From the directory containing the local copy of the learner-dashboard repository start the npm dev server.
(tutor-main) $ npm run dev
Exercise: Update the Learner Dashboard#
The Learner Dashboard is the first page that students will see after they log into Open edX.
The dashboard page will either be provided by a legacy server side template or by the learner-dashboard MFE. Working with the MFE is usually the best choice. Note that this tutorial is simplistic and appropriate to get started. However, we don’t recommend forking an MFE to customize it. For extensive modifications, that might be necessary, but for simple things using design tokens and frontend plugin slots will be a much better alternative.
Working with the Learner Dashboard MFE#
Working with the Legacy Learner Dashboard#
On our Tutor dev environment, it is located at
http://local.openedx.io:8000/dashboard
As an exercise, you’re going to make a small edit to the top of this page. This is not a change that will be merged upstream, but it will demonstrate the steps you will have to go through to make a real change.
Edit the Template#
The template file for this page is at lms/templates/dashboard.html. We’re
going to add a simple welcome message to the dashboard-notifications div:
<div class="dashboard-notifications" tabindex="-1">
<!-- start new content -->
Welcome to your dashboard!
<!-- end new content -->
Feel free to replace the welcome text with any message you’d like and save the file. When you reload it in your browser, you should see something like this:
Standard Operating Procedure For Backend or Frontend Changes#
Make a Commit#
Now that you’ve saved your changes, you can make a commit. First make a new
branch with the name developer_quickstart:
git checkout -b developer_quickstart
Then we can create the actual commit. Note that Open edX commit messages should follow our conventional commit practices. In our case, we’re making a new feature, so our commit message must be prefixed with “feat:” like so:
commit -a -m "feat: add welcome message to learner dashboard"
Push the Commit to Your Fork#
Now push your changes to a new branch in your fork:
git push --set-upstream origin developer_quickstart
If you get a fatal: Authentication failed error, authenticate Git Hub by running:
gh auth login
Learn more about authentication here.
Create A Pull Request#
Go to your fork.
github/<your_github_username>/edx-platform
At the top of the page you’ll see a section that will suggest that you make a new pull request. Go ahead and click the big green button.
This will bring up a form which you don’t need to make any changes in for now. Go ahead hit “Create Pull Request” again.
Congratulations, you have made a new pull request for a change against the Open edX project!
Because this was a practice PR, it will be closed without the changes being accepted. This is so others can continue to go through the same quickstart.
However for any real changes you make in the future, you can expect that the reviewers will review your changes and may ask for changes or accept your changes as is and merge them.
Note
To contribute to Open edX documentation, you must have a signed contributor agreement. For more information, see How to start contributing to the Open edX code base.
If you are now looking for something to work on, please see How to start contributing to the Open edX code base.
If you need more help or run into issues, check out the Getting Help section of the documentation for links to some places where you could get help.
Maintenance Chart
Review Date |
Working Group Reviewer |
Release |
Test situation |
2025-03-19 |
e0d (Ed Zarecor) |
Tutor dev locally |