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loomerds edited this page Mar 23, 2013 · 19 revisions

Canvas by Instructure!

Canvas is a new, open-source LMS by Instructure Inc. It is released under the AGPLv3 license for use by anyone interested in learning more about or using learning management systems.

Are you looking for one of our commercial subscriptions, professional services, support, or our hosted solution? Please visit our main website.

Trying Out Canvas

If you'd like to use Canvas in your own course, or you just want try Canvas out, there is no need to do all the work of installing it yourself. Canvas Cloud is Free for Teachers to use, just sign up to get started.

If at a later time you do want to migrate from your own install to Canvas Cloud, or vice versa, you can use the course export and import features to migrate all your content.

Getting Help

Contributing

In order for us to continue to dual-license our Canvas product to best serve all of our customers, we need you to sign our contributor agreement before we can accept a pull request from you. Please read our FAQ for more information, and be sure to review the Coding Guidelines.

To save yourself a considerable headache, please consider doing development against our master branch, instead of the default stable branch. Our stable branch is occasionally reforked from master, so your Git history may get very confused if you are attempting to contribute changesets against stable.

Installation Tutorials

Getting Code

There are two primary ways to get a copy of Canvas LMS

Using Git

You can install Git on Debian/Ubuntu by running

$ sudo apt-get install git-core

Once you have a copy of Git installed on your system, getting the latest source for Canvas is as simple as checking out code from the repo, like so:

~$ git clone https://github.com/instructure/canvas-lms.git canvas
~$ cd canvas
~/canvas$ git checkout --track -b stable origin/stable

Using a Tarball or a Zip

You can also download a tarball or zipfile.