Preparation For Production Launch

This guide documents my experiences preparing to launch a production service on a dedicated server.

The initial starting point for this guide is to first follow the instructions given at the following link using a dedicated ubuntu 12.04 minimal server installation:
https://github.com/edx/configuration/wiki/edX-Ubuntu-12.04-64-bit-Installation

Only login with keys

Setup Firewall

In a new Ubuntu 12.04 server, install MongoDB with the following commands:

sudo apt-key adv --keyserver hkp://keyserver.ubuntu.com:80 --recv 7F0CEB10
echo 'deb http://downloads-distro.mongodb.org/repo/ubuntu-upstart dist 10gen' | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/mongodb.list
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install mongodb-10gen

Configure MongoDb to allow access from any computer, by editing the /etc/mongodb.conf file and adding bind_ip = 0.0.0.0 port = 27017

I strongly recommend you also set up some firewall in this computer, like Ubuntu's ufw.

Install MySQL with this command: apt-get install mysql-server

Configure mysql to allow external access for the root user. In /etc/mysql/my.cnf add the line: bind-address = 0.0.0.0

and also execute the following mysql commands:

GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON *.* TO root@'%';
FLUSH PRIVILEGES;

I think you only need to assign privileges on the edxapp, ora and xqueue databases so you probably could be more restrictive in the grant order.

-Backup your data and restore it in the new server. You can do it with: mongodump -o ./mongo-backup mongorestore -drop ./mongo-backup mysqldump -u root -p --all-databases > ./backup.sql mysql -u root -p < ./backup.sql

-Configure the edx servers to use the new database server. You'll need to edit the following files and change the host/users/passwords in accordance to your db server settings:

lms.auth.json
cms.auth.json
ora.auth.json
xqueue.auth.json
forum/forum_env

-In the edx servers you can stop the mysql and mongodb services. To prevent them to start when booting the system, create the text files /etc/init/mysql.override and /etc/init/mongodb.override with the string: manual into them.