I received an email earlier to say Canvas LMS will soon be added to the Bitnami Stack.
It will be interesting to see what happens with that as it will allow anyone to get up and running with it.
It maybe that we see web hosts adding one click installers for it.
I think you would be very unwise to try and use Canvas productively (unless you have the expertise within your organisation) on a self hosted / managed basis or even through one of the hosts now offering this as a service.
Productively speaking Instructures own SaaS service is really the only game in town but I doubt that will stop people digging a hole for themselves!
I managed to get Canvas working on a Ubuntu virtual machine once from the Open Source repository. Took a while and had to patch the code with a fix that had been reported but not integrated. Difficult stuff.
On the plus side, Bitnami are awesome and are great if you want to try out Moodle: https://bitnami.com/stack/moodle# - in my presentation for iMoot 2014 I really liked them: www.slideshare.net/gb2048/my-own-moodle, drive.google.com/drive/#folders/0B17B0rYH2zERU21sQnVweUZCUFk and .
I now have over 6000 unread posts in the email notifications from the Canvas forums since I started my Canvas watching project nine months ago - and I have read hundreds of the posts. There is some help there if people want to bother, but most requests for detailed help at the server level do not get the attention a similar post on Moodle.org will get.
There is still a shortage of good ruby programmers in this county as far as I know.
Ruby is fast and powerful when done right.
One of the institutions I have worked with have ditched Blackboard, evaluated Moodle, and gone with Canvas. Multiple schools, teacher education. It's what you value. I asked in Aussie for the original school that went with Canvas, and got a little information. But nothing we don';t already know. Never is this an objective decision.
My considered decision: "The grass is not greener"
-Derek
I'm going to "stick my neck out" and suggest that if you don't have the skills and experience to install a server application "the long way" - thus understanding what you did - then you probably shouldn't be installing server applications.
I just don't understand Bitnami. You click a button and the wheels turn and you have absolutely no idea what happened. Doesn't sound like a good idea to me...
Hi Howard & Jez,
Bitnami cloud stacks are much more than just installing a server app, they're virtual server images (Linux, Apache, MySQL, & PHP and variants on these) plus a server app.
I can install web apps the long way no problem (on a managed hosting service with a LAMP + phpMyAdmin + cPanel stack already configured), I can install and configure a LAMP stack on a PC (CLI) or a remote server (SSH), and I can successfully install "pre-rolled" virtual server images (on AWS, without Bitnami's help), but I don't know how to roll my own. At what point does the minimum expertise required begin?
The big advantage of virtual private servers is that you only pay for what you use and the resources for your Moodle can expand instantly to accommodate peaks in traffic/concurrent users, e.g. during course tests and deadlines.
But yes, as Jez also put it, whoever's responsible for managing the Moodle installation must at least know how to update, extend, and service it.
I've only really encountered it on Amazon's cloud services. I tried to set up Alfresco for a demo using Bitnami and I ended up with a system that didn't seem to work and didn't match the Alfresco documentation.
So, I did what I should have done in the first place - binned the Bitnami build, created an Ubuntu VM and installed Alfresco using the Alfresco docs. This time it worked vs. Bitnami - waste of time.
I appreciate that if I knew next to nothing about Linux then the time figuring out Bitnami's install may have been less than a big Linux learning curve. But, see above, I possibly shouldn't have been there in the first place if I was in that position.
You'll not be surprised to hear that I also hate cPanel
Just my jaded opinion
Have you ever been in and looked at a Linux system with cPanel on top? It makes an incredible mess of everything. Worse (and extending from the above) it has its own unique view of the world and sticks things in weird places. A system configured by cPanel can be horrible to debug and maintain.
I don't want to sound snobby but it lowers the entry level of system administration. Which is kind of a good thing but mostly isn't. It allows people who have no real clue what they are doing to administer their server. You see them here in the support forums every day. It's not really doing them any favours as they don't even bother to learn the basics because cPanel makes them think they don't have to.
Ironically, it's also very difficult to use. Things that could be done simply from the command line become onerous, difficult to find or can't be done at all using cPanel.
I would encourage anybody who wants to administer their own system to invest a little time in learning the command line and the basic principles that go along with it. It's good for you