Self host & Install Canvas LMS on your own server

Following the production guide created by Instructure for Canvas LMS Installation gave me a pretty tough time as there were so many steps and instructions missing from this guide.

I have created a detailed step-by-step guide incorporating all the missing steps which would save days of frustrations & debugging.

Complete Guide: https://elearningevolve.com/blog/install-canvas-lms/

I hope it benefits the community!

Find more posts tagged with

Accepted answers

johnmurphy11

**** EDIT 1/9/2024 ****

I was able to get this up and running finally. My problem ultimately was that I did not have the minimum specs outlined in your post: I only had 2 CPU cores instead of 4 on my droplet. My underpowered droplet was not able to complete Step 5 properly.

I started over from scratch and was able to get Canvas running with a working admin login, but I still needed the following corrections/additional steps:

Step 3: sudo chown "$current_user":"$current_user" "$new_directory"/canvas I had to add a -R to the chown command in order to recursively change ownership for all the files in the canvas directory or else it's not possible to continue the setup as a regular user.
Step 6: This is necessary to resolve an issue with base64 gem: In the passenger.conf file I added PassengerPreloadBundler On
Step 9: I had to add sudo ufw allow ssh before reloading ufw. You have to add this rule or else you firewall yourself out of your machine.
Step 9: Not necessary to get up and going, but needed if you want all of those ufw rules to actually be active: instead of sudo ufw reload, you need to do sudo ufw enable. sudo ufw reload does nothing if ufw is not enabled first.
Step 10: Canvas updated the example redis.yml config file so you need to replace servers: with url: or your login will not work

All comments

Chris

Hi @Adeel-Raza,

Thanks for sharing your resource. I am not an expert in this area at all, but one thing caught my eye: "We will install Canvas in your current user home directory so that there are no permission issues later on and the user is able to access the files." Maybe someone else in this group can comment, but installing Canvas to a user directory does not seem like a good practice for a production server (and maybe not even a test one). It may help avoid permission issues short term, but what if that user is later removed from the system because they retire, leave, are terminated, etc...? Couldn't that cause the entire Canvas install to be wiped out? Maybe I'm just misreading, or maybe that's how Canvas installs are usually done, but it just strikes me as odd. Anyone else have experience in this area and willing to comment?

-Chris

johnmurphy11

**** EDIT 1/9/2024 ****

I started over from scratch and was able to get Canvas running with a working admin login, but I still needed the following corrections/additional steps:

Step 3: sudo chown "$current_user":"$current_user" "$new_directory"/canvas I had to add a -R to the chown command in order to recursively change ownership for all the files in the canvas directory or else it's not possible to continue the setup as a regular user.
Step 6: This is necessary to resolve an issue with base64 gem: In the passenger.conf file I added PassengerPreloadBundler On
Step 9: I had to add sudo ufw allow ssh before reloading ufw. You have to add this rule or else you firewall yourself out of your machine.
Step 9: Not necessary to get up and going, but needed if you want all of those ufw rules to actually be active: instead of sudo ufw reload, you need to do sudo ufw enable. sudo ufw reload does nothing if ufw is not enabled first.
Step 10: Canvas updated the example redis.yml config file so you need to replace servers: with url: or your login will not work

LMRamosBR

Hello @Adeel-Raza

Thank you SO MUCH for providing this amazing guide. I really appreciate it.
Especially after struggling with the official instructions and not being able to install it.

Actually, it was the only one that I was able to access the login screen.

Unfortunately, I'm still having issues logging in. I get this error every time:

Invalid Authenticity Token

Even when I try to reinitialize the DB, I'm still getting this issue. :

RAILS_ENV=production bundle exec rake db:initial_setup

I would greatly appreciate any guidance or insight you can offer.

Thank you again.

Regards,
Luis

Adeel-Raza

Glad to know that it was helpful.

I see a similar post on this issue and one user has mentioned here that it can be due to missing or incorrect SSL configuration. So
you can try looking into this.

You can also try to get the last 5 errors from your canvas instance from command line as below. It might have an additional hint.

psql canvas-prod -c "select created_at, message from error_reports order by id desc LIMIT 5;"

maclenn77

Hi, @Adeel-Raza . Your post helps me a lot to set up my instance and get it running. Kudos!

I had problems with the setup of canvas-rce-api. Trying to solve it, I found a user who noticed the lack of documentation for Apache Web Server and proposed to add documentation for this step using Passenger. The solution was overcomplicated, but I found a way to setup canvas-rce-api without leaving running the node app with `screen`command. I think its a more reliable solution. I share with you the steps:

Conf canvas-rce-api node app with Apache + Passenger

Edit the canvas.conf file that you already created for the rails application on this way:

*:80>
# Your previous config is something like below
    ServerName example.domain
    DocumentRoot /path/to/my/app
>
        Allow from all
        Options -MultiViews
# Uncomment this if you're on Apache >= 2.4:
#Require all granted
>

# These have been added:
    Alias /subapp /websites/secondapp/public
>
        PassengerBaseURI /subapp
        PassengerAppRoot /websites/secondapp

        PassengerAppType node
        PassengerStartupFile app.js
>
>
        Allow from all
        Options -MultiViews
# Uncomment this if you're on Apache >= 2.4:
#Require all granted
>
>

After that, enable the new config and restart apache.

$ sudo a2ensite canvas.conf &&  sudo systemctl restart apache2

Troubleshooting

In theory, Passenger would be able to run node by itself, but if you find issues (as it happened to me), just do this:

Find Node location

$ whereis node

Edit Passenger.conf file

(In my case, located in /etc/apache2/mods-available/Passenger.conf)

### Begin automatically installed Phusion Passenger config snippet ###
<IfModule mod_passenger.c>
  PassengerRoot /usr/lib/ruby/vendor_ruby/phusion_passenger/locations.ini
  PassengerDefaultRuby /usr/bin/passenger_free_ruby
  PassengerNodejs YOUR_NODE_PATH_HERE
 # MORE CONFIG LINES  
  ...
</IfModule>
### End automatically installed Phusion Passenger config snippet ###

Enable mod and restart apache

$ sudo a2enmod passenger
$ sudo systemctl restart apache2

So, the node app should run in apache without issues.

You can check the github discussion here.

Adeel-Raza

@maclenn77 Thank you so much for sharing this bit. Will look into this and see if it works correctly for us too.

I'm glad that our guide has been helpful to you.

bigmac_xlt

I found that your "ProxyPass" instructions in for the apache config to direct requests to canvas-rce-api were incomplete. Specifically, they only handled requests with paths like "/api/sessions" while there are many other types of requests the api should handle.

I found your instructions could be easily fixed in two steps:

1. Add a namespace path to the "app-host" value in dynamic_settings.yml e.g. "https://mydomain.com/rce"

2. Change the apache config file to use these lines:

  ProxyPass /rce/ http://localhost:3001/
  ProxyPassReverse /rce/ http://localhost:3001/

This way, ALL requests that canvas-rce-api should handle will be correctly directed to the backgrounded process on port 3001.

Adeel-Raza

I have figured that the comment posted here is quite helpful if you face any issues with the RCe setup. Following this resolves any errors that you might have,
https://github.com/instructure/canvas-rce-api/issues/6#issuecomment-631818899

muimid

Thank you so much!

Your guide has made installing Canvas such a breeze! However, I'm still getting a challenge when installing the RCE. It breaks my Canvas installation every time! (And I've tried 5 times! And every time I came to a "403 Forbidden" message.) Eventually, through trial and error, I managed to install Canvas by leaving out this part of your guide.

But we all know we need the RCE for Canvas to work well, so has anyone figured out a solution?

I will really appreciate this as I'd like to update my institution's Canvas instance from the 2021 version to 2025.

Thank you once again.

jdpark7

Thanks for the installation guide at https://elearningevolve.com/blog/install-canvas-lms/

I got error message when I build assets , yarn build since the package.json in the recent canvas git repository requires react 18 but some tsx files uses react 17 syntax.

https://github.com/instructure/canvas-lms/blob/master/packages/canvas-rce/src/rce/plugins/shared/Upload/UploadFile.tsx
https://github.com/instructure/canvas-lms/blob/master/packages/canvas-rce/src/rce/plugins/instructure_color/clickCallback.tsx
https://github.com/instructure/canvas-lms/blob/master/packages/canvas-rce/src/rce/plugins/instructure_wordcount/clickCallback.tsx
https://github.com/instructure/canvas-lms/blob/master/packages/canvas-rce/src/rce/plugins/instructure_rce_external_tools/dialog-helper.tsx
https://github.com/instructure/canvas-lms/blob/master/packages/canvas-rce/src/rce/plugins/instructure_search_and_replace/clickCallback.tsx

I wonder if someone refactored tsx files. Thanks in advance.

howster123

Trying the install from https://github.com/instructure/canvas-lms/wiki/Production-Start and getting Ruby issues. Install references Ruby 3.3.3 but during installation the systems in looking for Ruby 3.4.1 - see https://github.com/instructure/canvas-lms/blob/master/Gemfile.d/_before.rb (last line) and https://github.com/instructure/canvas-lms/issues/2521

Must have tried this install 12 times from scratch with no success. Seems changes in the files referenced at

git clone https://github.com/instructure/canvas-lms.git canvas

...is the issue. Trying with Ubuntu 22.04. I also tried

Anyone got a working tutorial? Expected this to be a lot easier. Using a DigitalOcean droplet with Ubuntu 22.04, 8GB Ram and 4 CPUs. Is there a specific canvas-lms.git release I should be using from year ago or something that works with Ruby 3.3.3?

Thanks

Unanswered Questions

Concluded Course and Canvas Data Services
Canvas Data Services sent out an alert that a course was concluded (because the course was concluded) and the status of each user in the UI is set to complete, however, the enrollments API endpoint shows the status of each user in the course as active. Is this a common issue? Have I misinterpreted how the individual…
Canvas Media Question
How can one track Canvas Media use without having the reports available from Canvas Studio? Checking API endpoints and the Data 2 schema, there do not seem to be dedicated Canvas Media endpoints. Am I missing some? A method I've considered is using the body field of the wiki_pages table, as this contains the html code of…
Canvas Catalog API - Completed Certificates
Hello, I'm trying to utilize an API call to pull completed certificates and was hoping to download and store the certs as a backup. I can successfully run the API call but it will not allow me to view the certificate unless I access the URL while signed into an account where it's "my" cert. Is there a permissions setting…
UI for weekly progression idea
UI for weekly progression idea that rest in the Schedule tab of the **K-12 UI** of Canvas it's incomplete and I really would not take it and push it into instance but I am going to post it here because in the past people like @James && @robotcars || @Steve_25 have had terrific input in the past... maybe w/their eyes and…
Canvas integration with React + Flask webapp - initially for authenticaiton
I have a new React + Flask webapp. It has its own login for users to start using the app. I have added this as an external tool in Canvas. What I want initially is to see of canvas users can start using the webapp without having to login if they click on the external tool link in a canvas course. I have 2 methods…