Migrating from Bitnami to Tutor

Hello everyone

In our company we recently set up an Edx-Plattform with Bitnami. Sadly we had to notice, that various things (like setting up Microsoft Course Voucher validation) didn’t work with the Bitnami-Version.
Regrettably, this platform was already used commercially.

This means we now have some existing Course-Data, and instead of having everyone repeat their courses, we would like to simply migrate the Data.

The Bitnami-Version runs under the Hawthorn release.
We know that migrating from an earlier version of Edx to the current one should be possible, thanks to the following guide
The guide is for the Ginkgo to Hawthorne migration, but going from Hawthorn to Ironwood should be similar.
There is also a guide from Bitnami on how to dump the DB-Data.

Now, I created this thread to ask some question to spare my team some headache down the line.

  1. Do you think migrating from Bitnami away is even possible? Or would it be smarter to start from scratch?
  2. Do you think that applying the DB-Data from the Bitnami-Release is possible? If so, should the procedure outlined in the guides be sufficient or is there something we might have to watch out for?

I hope you can help me.

P.S.: I am thrilled to have found Tutor. Setting up Edx the regular way was quite the headache, and Tutor simplified this process greatly.

Hi @ProtoBrunch!

By all means, please don’t create a new platform from scratch, where students would have to re-subscribe, enroll, and you would have to create the courses all over again. Instead, I suggest you first upgrade your existing platform to Ironwood, and then take your time to migrate to Tutor (if necessary). For the second step, there are three data sources that need to be migrated: mysql, mongodb and static file uploads. I don’t have a running bitnami instance, so I can’t verify if the migration guide works as advertised. What I’m sure is that you won’t be able to follow it line by line with tutor, as the data is organised differently. So, to answer your questions:

  1. Yes, it’s possible. Don’t restart from scratch.
  2. Yes it’s possible, but you’ll have to experiment and think for yourself quite a bit. I guess it would be worthwhile for me to write a precise migration guide.

Hello @regis

Thank you for your answer.
Yeah, we’re trying to avoid that situation. We were only entertaining the idea simply because the Bitnami-version is quite screwed up from what we’ve read in support forums and the Edx-Slack-channels.

I’ll investigate this issue further. Once I have something to report, i’ll get back to you.

Thanks for this encouragement. We’re hoping to migrate from a self-installed Hawthorne (nightmare!) to Tutor. I assume the same migration tips apply? Do I understand correctly that we will first have to upgrade to a manually-installed Ironwood, then to Tutor?

Yes. Note that I have not tested myself if the procedure works.

Do I understand correctly that we will first have to upgrade to a manually-installed Ironwood, then to Tutor?

Yes. However, there are no upgrade instructions for the native installation :sweat_smile: Upgrading directly from native Hawthorn to Tutor Juniper might might just work. In theory, nothing prevents this upgrade, but again, I have not personally tried this out.