Problem in accessing custom html page served on port 5959 from https://vlabs.ac.in

[ashay-maheshwari]

Story Open edX configures nginx for itself and blocks port 80 to serve web pages. Because of strict configuration, an attempt to serve any other custom html page from Open edX resulted in 500 internal server error. To overcome this problem ,we served custom html pages from port 5959.

Problem Since 5959 is not in well-defined port range, most of the organisations and institutes block such ports. As a result of this, institutes were not able to access custom web pages from https://vlabs.ac.in. Example of such a page is - http://vlabs.ac.in:5959/search_feature/disciplines/ElectricalEngineering/index.html

Workaround To solve the above problem, the idea of serving custom html pages from another machine (hence another webserver) was brought up in a quick meeting on April 19, 2017. Following are the details -

1. Have https://vlabs.ac.in to serve Open edX webpages.
2. Have https://info.vlabs.ac.in to serve our custom pages.
3. Reference to all links with port 5959 can be replaced for corresponding page on https://info.vlabs.ac.in.
4. Have proper links to allow user to navigate from https://vlabs.ac.in to https://info.vlabs.ac.in vice-versa.

[ashay-maheshwari]

Plan

1. Launch a machine in AWS and install the following - a. nginx b. git-core
2. Give a domain name to the machine - Given info.vlabs.ac.in
3. Install SSL certificates
4. Create a separate repository to hold custom html pages.
5. Apply link changes in Open edX test machine to replace https://vlabs.ac.in:5959to https://info.vlabs.ac.in

[ashay-maheshwari]

Detailed documentation - https://github.com/openedx-vlead/vlabs-custom-info-pages/blob/master/src/index.org

[ashay-maheshwari]

Design of theme applied on VLABS Open edX on https://vlabs.ac.in