All work
Infrastructure / LMS
School of Sex Therapy Canvas LMS
Installed and configured Canvas LMS for School of Sex Therapy on a dedicated DigitalOcean server, including NGINX reverse proxy, SSL and DNS so students can sign in at my.schoolofsextherapy.com.
- Canvas LMS
- DigitalOcean
- NGINX
- SSL
- DNS
- Linux
Overview
The organization needed a self-hosted learning platform for courses, not only a public website. I installed Canvas LMS on DigitalOcean and configured the server, reverse proxy, certificates and DNS so the LMS is reachable on a custom subdomain.
Problem
A marketing or application site cannot run live coursework. Students needed a real LMS login, and the organization wanted it on their own domain and infrastructure rather than an unmanaged hosted account.
Approach
I provisioned a DigitalOcean droplet sized for Canvas, installed the LMS, put NGINX in front of it, issued SSL and pointed DNS at the server so https://my.schoolofsextherapy.com/ serves the Canvas login.
Key features
- Canvas LMS installed on a dedicated DigitalOcean droplet
- Server sized at 4 vCPU, 8 GB RAM and 160 GB disk
- NGINX reverse proxy in front of the LMS
- SSL configured for HTTPS on the custom subdomain
- DNS records pointing my.schoolofsextherapy.com at the droplet
- Student and admin login through the Instructure Canvas interface
Architecture
- 01DigitalOcean droplet: 4 vCPU, 8 GB RAM, 160 GB disk
- 02Canvas LMS (Instructure) on Linux
- 03NGINX as reverse proxy
- 04SSL termination for HTTPS
- 05DNS for my.schoolofsextherapy.com → droplet
Challenges
Canvas is a heavy Rails application. It needs enough CPU, memory and disk, a correct proxy setup, valid certificates and DNS that actually resolves to the server — any one of those wrong and login fails.
Solution
The droplet was sized for Canvas rather than a tiny web VM. NGINX, SSL and DNS were configured together so the hostname, certificate and upstream all match. The live result is the Canvas login at my.schoolofsextherapy.com.
Results
- Production LMS available at my.schoolofsextherapy.com
- HTTPS login with organization-owned DNS and hosting
Screenshots
[Screenshots placeholder — project images can be added here]