Configuration Management
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Introduction
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The goal of the edx/configuration project is to provide a simple, but flexible,
way for anyone to stand up an instance of Open edX that is fully configured and
ready-to-go.

Before getting started, please look at the `Open EdX Installation options`_, to
see which method for deploying OpenEdX is right for you.

Building the platform takes place in two phases:

-  Infrastructure provisioning
-  Service configuration

As much as possible, we have tried to keep a clean distinction between
provisioning and configuration. You are not obliged to use our tools and are
free to use one, but not the other. The provisioning phase stands-up the
required resources and tags them with role identifiers so that the
configuration tool can come in and complete the job.

**Note**: The Cloudformation templates used for infrastructure provisioning are
no longer maintained. We are working to move to a more modern and flexible
tool.

The reference platform is provisioned using an Amazon `CloudFormation`_
template. When the stack has been fully created you will have a new AWS Virtual
Private Cloud with hosts for the core Open edX services. This template will
build quite a number of AWS resources that cost money, so please consider this
before you start.

The configuration phase is managed by `Ansible`_. We have provided a number of
playbooks that will configure each of the Open edX services.

**Important**: The Open edX configuration scripts need to be run as root on
your servers and will make changes to service configurations including, but not
limited to, sshd, dhclient, sudo, apparmor and syslogd. Our scripts are made
available as we use them and they implement our best practices. We strongly
recommend that you review everything that these scripts will do before running
them against your servers. We also recommend against running them against
servers that are hosting other applications. No warranty is expressed or
implied.

For more information including installation instruction please see the `OpenEdX
Wiki`_.

For info on any large recent changes please see the `change log`_.

.. _Open EdX Installation options: https://open.edx.org/installation-options
.. _CloudFormation: http://aws.amazon.com/cloudformation/
.. _Ansible: http://ansible.com/
.. _OpenEdX Wiki: https://openedx.atlassian.net/wiki/display/OpenOPS/Open+edX+Operations+Home
.. _change log: https://github.com/edx/configuration/blob/master/CHANGELOG.md
