Quick Start - bangbay/canvas-lms GitHub Wiki
This guide is intended for those who want to get a version of Canvas LMS running as quickly as possible (e.g. for a development environment). The environment produced by this guide is lacking in several features (e.g. emails are not sent out, delayed jobs are not daemonized, there is no proper application server provided) and is not suitable for production use.
See the Production Start guide for instructions on standing up a production-ready system.
If you need help installing Canvas or troubleshooting your installation, your best bet is to join the community mailing list or the IRC channel (see the Home page) and ask specific questions there. It's likely that somebody else has already tackled the same problem. Note that a common category of questions are those that stem from following this guide instead of the Production Start guide. If you are sure that you want to continue with the Quick Start guide, read on.
Setup
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 latest Ubuntu LTS. We'll assume you've either done so or are familiar with these working parts enough to do translations yourself.
Getting the code
There are two primary ways to get a copy of Canvas: git or zip/tar download.
Using Git
If you don't already have Git, you can install it on Debian/Ubuntu by running
$ sudo apt-get install git
Once you have a copy of Git installed on your system, getting the latest source for Canvas is as simple as checking out code from the repo, like so:
~$ git clone https://github.com/instructure/canvas-lms.git canvas
~$ cd canvas
~$ git checkout stable
Using a Tarball or a Zip Download
You can also download a tarball or zip file.
Application root
Wherever you check out the code to, we're going to call that your application root. The application root is the folder that has folders such as app, config, and script. For the purposes of this tutorial, we'll assume your application root is /home/user/canvas.
Dependency Installation
Canvas requires Ruby 2.4 or greater. A minimum version of 2.4.4 is recommended.
External Dependencies
Debian/Ubuntu
We now need to install the Ruby libraries and packages that Canvas needs. On Debian/Ubuntu, there are a few packages you're going to need to install. If you're running Ubuntu 14.04 Trusty, you'll need to add a PPA in order to get Ruby 2.4:
$ sudo apt-get install software-properties-common
$ sudo add-apt-repository ppa:brightbox/ruby-ng
$ sudo apt-get update
$ sudo apt-get install ruby2.4 ruby2.4-dev zlib1g-dev libxml2-dev \
libsqlite3-dev postgresql-9.5 libpq-dev \
libxmlsec1-dev curl make g++
Note: In Ubuntu, in case you encounter any error such as E: Package 'postgresql-9.5' has no installation candidate, it may be because postgresql-9.5 is not available in that Ubuntu version. See https://www.postgresql.org/download/linux/ubuntu/
Node.js installation:
$ curl -sL https://deb.nodesource.com/setup_10.x | sudo -E bash -
$ sudo apt-get install -y nodejs build-essential
$ curl -sS https://dl.yarnpkg.com/debian/pubkey.gpg | sudo apt-key add -
$ echo "deb https://dl.yarnpkg.com/debian/ stable main" | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/yarn.list
$ sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install yarn=1.10.1-1
After installing Postgres, you will need to set your system username as a postgres superuser. You can do so by running the following commands:
sudo -u postgres createuser $USER
sudo -u postgres psql -c "alter user $USER with superuser" postgres
macOS
For macOS, you'll need to install the Command Line Tools for Xcode, and make sure you have Ruby 2.4. You can find out what version of Ruby your Mac came with by running:
$ ruby -v
You also need Postgres and the xmlsec library installed. The easiest way to get these is via homebrew. Once you have homebrew installed, just run:
$ brew install [email protected] node@10 xmlsec1
Ruby Gems
Most of Canvas' dependencies are Ruby Gems. Ruby Gems are a Ruby-specific package management system that operates orthogonally to operating-system package management systems.
Bundler
Canvas uses Bundler as an additional layer on top of Ruby Gems to manage versioned dependencies. Bundler is great!
You can install Bundler using Ruby Gems:
$ sudo gem install bundler -v 1.13.6
On Debian 8 Jessie, you'll need to substitute gem with gem2.4.
Canvas Dependencies
Once you have installed Bundler, please navigate to the Canvas application root, where you can install all of the Canvas dependencies using Bundler.
~$ cd canvas
~/canvas$ bundle install
~/canvas$ yarn install --pure-lockfile
# Sometimes you have to run this command twice if there is an error
~/canvas$ yarn install --pure-lockfile
If you're on macOS Mavericks or macOS Yosemite and hit an error with the thrift gem, you might have to set the following bundler flag and then run bundle install again (see https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/THRIFT-2219):
~/canvas$ bundle config build.thrift --with-cppflags='-D_FORTIFY_SOURCE=0'
If you are on El Capitan and encounter an error with the thrift gem that has something like the following in the text.
compact_protocol.c:431:41: error: shifting a negative signed value is undefined [-Werror,-Wshift-negative-value]
Use the following command to install the gem and then continue with another bundle install.
gem install thrift -v 0.8.0 -- --with-cppflags=\"-D_FORTIFY_SOURCE=0 -Wno-shift-negative-value\"
The problem is the clang got updated in El Capitan and some of the flags cause problems now on install for the old version of thrift.
If you hit an error with the eventmachine gem, you might have to set the following bundler flag and then run bundle install again:
~/canvas$ bundle config build.eventmachine --with-cppflags=-I/usr/local/opt/openssl/include
Data setup
Canvas default configuration
Before we set up all the tables in your database, our Rails code depends on a small few configuration files, which ship with good example settings, so, we'll want to set those up quickly. We'll be examining them more shortly. From the root of your Canvas tree, you can pull in the default configuration values like so:
~/canvas$ for config in amazon_s3 delayed_jobs domain file_store outgoing_mail security external_migration; \
do cp -v config/$config.yml.example config/$config.yml; done
Dynamic settings configuration
This config file is useful if you don't want to run a consul cluster with canvas. Just provide the config data you would like for the DynamicSettings class to find, and it will use it whenever a call for consul data is issued. Data should be shaped like the example below, one key for the related set of data, and a hash of key/value pairs (no nesting)
~/canvas$ cp config/dynamic_settings.yml.example config/dynamic_settings.yml
File Generation
Canvas needs to build a number of assets before it will work correctly. You will need to run:
~/canvas$ bundle exec rails canvas:compile_assets
Note that we've seen trouble with npm trying to hold too many files open at once. If you see an error with libuv while running npm, try increasing your ulimit. To do this in macOS add ulimit -n 4096 to your ~/.bash_profile or ~/.zsh_profile.
Database configuration
Now we need to set up your database configuration. We have provided a sample file for quickstarts, so you just need to copy it in. You'll also want to create two databases. Depending on your OS (i.e. on Linux), you may need to use a postgres user to create the database, and configure database.yml to use a specific username to connect. See the Production Start tutorial for details on doing that. On macOS your local user will have permissions to create databases already, so no special configuration is necessary.
~/canvas$ cp config/database.yml.example config/database.yml
~/canvas$ createdb canvas_development
Note: When installing postgres with brew, you may have trouble connecting to the database and you may get an error like:
~/canvas$ createdb canvas_development
createdb: could not connect to database postgres: could not connect to server: No such file or directory
Is the server running locally and accepting
connections on Unix domain socket "/var/pgsql_socket/.s.PGSQL.5432"?
If you get a connection error when creating your databases, run the following and add it to your .bash_profile:
export PGHOST=localhost
If, after that, you get another error like:
~/canvas$ createdb canvas_development
createdb: could not connect to database template1: could not connect to server: Connection refused
Is the server running on host "localhost" (::1) and accepting
TCP/IP connections on port 5432?
could not connect to server: Connection refused
Is the server running on host "localhost" (127.0.0.1) and accepting
TCP/IP connections on port 5432?
could not connect to server: Connection refused
Is the server running on host "localhost" (fe80::1) and accepting
TCP/IP connections on port 5432?
then postgres may not be running. To start it:
$ initdb /usr/local/var/postgres -E utf8
$ pg_ctl -D /usr/local/var/postgres -l /usr/local/var/postgres/server.log start
Database population
Once your database is configured, we need to actually fill the database with tables and initial data. You can do this by running our migration and initialization tasks from your application's root:
~/canvas$ bundle exec rails db:initial_setup
Test database configuration
If you want to test your installation, you'll also need to create a test database:
psql -c 'CREATE USER canvas' -d postgres
psql -c 'ALTER USER canvas CREATEDB' -d postgres
createdb -U canvas canvas_test
psql -c 'GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON DATABASE canvas_test TO canvas' -d canvas_test
psql -c 'GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON ALL TABLES IN SCHEMA public TO canvas' -d canvas_test
psql -c 'GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON ALL SEQUENCES IN SCHEMA public TO canvas' -d canvas_test
RAILS_ENV=test bundle exec rails db:test:reset
Make sure you can run a spec file (the full suite takes too long to run locally):
bundle exec rspec spec/models/assignment_spec.rb
Performance Tweaks
Installing redis will significantly improve your Canvas performance. For detailed instructions, see Production Start#redis. On macOS, use the following:
brew install redis
redis-server /usr/local/etc/redis.conf
echo -e "development:\n cache_store: redis_store" > config/cache_store.yml
echo -e "development:\n servers:\n - redis://localhost" > config/redis.yml
On Ubuntu, use the following:
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install redis-server
redis-server
echo -e "development:\n cache_store: redis_store" > config/cache_store.yml
echo -e "development:\n servers:\n - redis://localhost" > config/redis.yml
If you're just looking to try out Canvas, there's some minor configuration tweaks you can make to give yourself a real performance boost. All you need to do is add three lines to a file in your configuration directory. (If you plan on doing Canvas development, you may want to skip this step or only enable class caching, as these settings will require you to restart your server each time you change Ruby or ERB files.)
~/canvas$ echo -n 'config.cache_classes = true
config.action_controller.perform_caching = true
config.action_view.cache_template_loading = true
' > config/environments/development-local.rb
Please be aware that the instructions described in the Production Start tutorial will give you a much faster Canvas installation.
A note about emails
Canvas will often attempt to send email. With the Quick Start instructions, email will go straight to the console that rails server is running on. If you want to set up email that actually goes to email addresses, please follow the Production Start instructions.
Ready, Set, Go!
Now you just need to start the Canvas server! You will need to run the rails server daemon:
~/canvas$ bundle exec rails server
Open up a browser on the same computer as the one running the server and navigate to http://localhost:3000/ and log in with the user credentials you set up during database configuration. If you don't have a browser running on the same computer, just use the hostname of the computer, and go to http://<hostname>:3000/.
Logging in For the First Time
Your username and password will be whatever you set it up to be during the rails db:initial_setup step above. (You should have seen a prompt on the command line that asked for your email and password.)
A note about long-running jobs
Canvas relies heavily on background job processors to perform tasks that take too long to do in-line during a web request. The Production Start instructions have details of how to set up dedicated job processors for production environments. To start a background job processor, run the following command:
~/canvas$ bundle exec script/delayed_job run
Running Canvas securely locally
Install puma-dev and follow the set up instructions. Add export THEADS=1 to ~/.powconfig. In Canvas, in domain.yml add ssl: true under the development section. In session_store.yml under development, add secure: true.
To start for Mac, set up puma-dev in launchctl launchctl load ~/Library/LaunchAgents/io.puma.dev.plist. You can view server logs by tailing the logs in log/development.log. You can have the certificates accepted by opening Keychain Access, and move the Puma-dev CA to System.
Troubleshooting
We have a full page of frequently asked questions about troubleshooting your Canvas installation. See our Troubleshooting page.
Production ready configuration
These instructions were meant to give you a taste of Canvas. If you want to actually set up a production ready Canvas instance, please read the Production Start page.