Set Or Change the LMS Site Domain#

Once your subscription has been upgraded, you can have the LMS site configured in your own domain.

Configure your domain#

This guide will explain the steps to configure the Open edX platform to publish the Learning site or LMS in your own domain. This is a key step towards delivering your online courses.

The steps below are meant for initiatives that are using eduNEXT’s Cloud subscriptions powered by Open edX and who already upgraded the subscription to a paid version. If you are running Open edX differently (for example in your installation) you’ll need to follow the Open edX official documentation instead.

For this guide, we will assume that:

  • You have an active Cloud subscription with eduNEXT

  • You already own an internet domain (we will call it “youracademy.com”) and have access to the domain admin console.

  • You are familiar with the very basics of DNS configurations.

  • You have already decided about the specific domain you want to use for your learning site, for example, www.youracademy.com or courses.youracademy.com

The basic process will entail 3 steps:

1. Accessing your domain DNS manager. The place to manage the DNS records for a domain is normally in the admin console of the registrar you purchased the domain registration from. (for example domain.com, godaddy.com, namecheap.com, bluehost.com, google domains, etc). Make sure you log in to the admin console given by your specific provider and look for the section to manage the DNS records. (It’s often called DNS manager, DNS admin, DNS zones manager).

2. Adding one DNS record to direct the traffic towards eduNEXT servers. All you need to do is to add one or two DNS records to your configuration, depending on the domain you are choosing:

Option 1. A subdomain: courses.youracademy.com

In this case, you need to add a CNAME record to the domain you want with the following settings:

Subdomain : courses (or whatever subdomain you are choosing)

Value : secure-la.edunext.co

Type of record : CNAME

TTL : 14400

Option 2. The naked domain: youracademy.com

In case you want to have the open edX site in the main domain, we recommend creating two DNS records:

  1. one A record for the naked domain “@” pointing to 52.38.30.184

Subdomain : @

Value : 52.38.30.184

Type of record : A

TTL : 14400

  1. one CNAME record for www pointing to secure-la.edunext.co. This will prevent your users to get lost if they accidentally use www.youracademy.com

Subdomain : www

Value : secure-la.edunext.co

Type of record : CNAME

TTL : 14400

3. Informing the eduNEXT support team about your configuration. Once you’ve made your changes, make sure to inform the eduNEXT support team of the domain or subdomain that you configured so that all the configurations can be tested and applied to production. You can do so by sending a support ticket with this information.

Keep in mind that the propagation of the DNS information over the internet may take a few hours, so your changes may not be reflected immediately in the service, but they will be reflected as soon as the propagation is done and the eduNEXT support team receives your information and applies the configurations.

Use your own SSL certificate#

If you have already purchased an SSL certificate for all their online services and do not wish to use the SSL certificate that eduNEXT provides free of charge, you can also coordinate with the eduNEXT support team as explained as follows. If you don’t have your SSL certificate you may simply ignore this section and your site will still be delivered securely with HTTPS encryption.

In case you want to use your own SSL certificate, the procedure will be:

Request via support ticket the creation of a CSR file (This is a certificate signing Request file – xxx.csr) for the type of SSL certificate that you plan to use. Once you receive the xxx.csr file, proceed to sign the certificate and send it back to the eduNEXT support team. The eduNEXT team will take care of the configurations.

Whenever your SSL certificate is close to expiration, you should renew it and restart the procedure with eduNEXT support for the renewed version to be configured in your LMS site.

Changing your LMS domain#

Changing your LMS’s site is not a step you want to lightly take as it will impact all the URLs of your site and courses, and it may require you to update any absolute URLs that have been referenced inside your course contents as well as all URL pointing to your LMS site in any other website.

However, if your strategy requires you to change your LMS domain, the change can be requested via a support ticket.

Before sending the request, make sure that you follow the same DNS configuration as for your initial domain and avoid removing the DNS records for the existing domain until the support team confirms that the change has been completed.