The next release of the Open edX platform, Ficus, is almost here.
For now, the edX engineering team has launched a pre-release, alpha version available just for testing but not for production purposes.
“We will have a real release candidate available soon, once we’ve worked out how to support course-discovery as a Docker container along with the rest of the installation,” said Ned Batchelder, an edX engineer in charge of the release. “We wanted to get these infrastructure changes into your hands as soon as possible so the eventual installation will be as smooth as possible.”
The “Ficus” version contains significant infrastructure changes, such as:
- Upgraded Ubuntu from 12.04 (Precise) to 16.04 (Xenial).
- Upgraded Ansible from 1.9 to 2.2
- Upgraded NodeJS from 0.10.36 to 6.9.2
In terms of the installation, for now only the native installation method is available, with these instructions. The edX engineering team is expecting feedback from developers via the mailing list or the Slack #ops channel.
The release of “Ficus” was initially announced for December 2016, but it might be delayed until January 2017.
