Bulk emails include links to example.com (SITE_ID misconfiguration)

[dyudyunov]

Bug description

Bottom line up:
Tutor installations have the SITE_ID setting pointing to the Django default example.com site while trying to avoid it.

While Tutor explicitly says that it uses SITE_ID = 2 because example.com already uses id 1, it doesn't work that way.

Actual state on any Tutor-based openedx instance I checked:

1. We don't have a record for id == 1 at all
2. id 2 is used by example.com
3. The target site (the site I'm expecting on id 2) uses id 3

After a shallow investigation I found:

• The problem is not reproducible for ecommerce (and I suspect for credentials/discovery as well).
• Most probably that's because when Django creates the example.com record - it uses SITE_ID from settings and sets it explicitly.
• Edx-platform has the SITE_ID setting set to 2 while e-commerce and discovery use the default value 1

Consequences

For cases when the platform can't define the site (e.g., from the request), it falls back to the site with id = SITE_ID with the appropriate consequences, like bulk emails being sent without the site branding.

How to check/reproduce

Go to the LMS admin site -> Sites and check IDs for example.com and your target domain (check the record URL for ID).

You can also try to navigate to the site object with ID = 1 (<LMS>/admin/sites/site/1/):

Environment

Mac OS 15.0.1
Tutor >=18;<19 (Redwood)

Workarounds

• swap sites with id 2 and 3 manually (tested)
• change SITE_ID setting to point to id 3 (not tested, possibly will work for existing installations only)
• add the Site Theme record in the admin site for example.com (tested with bulk emails case, works for branding, but links use incorrect domain example.com)

[regisb]

Hi,
You are describing your analysis of an issue but not clearly explaining what are the symptoms of this issue. Is the problem that bulk emails are sent without branding? If yes, please include screenshots of bulk emails before/after fix. Are there other side effects of not correctly setting SITE_ID? Then we need to know about those and document them here.

FTR I was able to confirm that SITE_ID=2 points to example.com: https://sandbox.openedx.edly.io/admin/sites/site/ But it's not clear to me what the consequences are.

I'm not sure yet what's the best solution to this problem, as I don't know for sure what the actual problem is. But in my dream world, we would not have to define SITE_ID at all in the Django setting: the value of this setting is tied to the database, which means that we need to run migrations before defining settings. But obviously, we also need to define settings to run migrations. This circular dependency should be removed, if possible.

[dyudyunov]

Hi @regisb

For now, I know only about the bulk email issue, but as I said in the issue description, the case potentially affects all the functionality that needs a correct site to define branding or get site configuration values. I would search across the celery tasks for such cases.

Here is an example of a bulk email without a fix (note: the email is sent from the main site, I don't have tenants):

And after the fix: