Open edX Releases Its Twelfth Version of the Platform Called ‘Lilac’

IBL News | New York

The edX organization released this month its twelfth version of the Open edX platform called Lilac. This release comes on time, six months after the launch of Koa.

Developers working on Lilac explained that a new installation method was added: a Docker-based, open-source AGPL v3, community-supported distribution named Tutor.

The native installation from scratch, on a single Ubuntu 20.04 64-bit server, remained for skillful developers and Linux system administrators.

“Because the Open edX community has been moving away from the toolset underlying the native installation, Lilac will be the last release using it,” explained Adolfo Brandes, an engineer working on Tutor. “By the time Maple — the next Open edX version — comes out this December, we expect to drop support for it altogether.”

A third supported installation method is Devstack — a development environment useful to modify code locally.

In addition to the Tutor dockerized installation, currently, Lilac Open edX included three improvements:

  • A “Complete the course” button allows learners to know if they’ve passed or completed a course.
  • The LTI consumer XBlock can now expose content via LTI 1.3.
  • More micro-frontends enabled by default: notably, the ones that now render the account settings and checkout pages.

Open edX Lilac Release Notes