After you clone the Edx repo there you will find a (undocumented) list of packages required to install on Ubuntu:

requirements/system/ubuntu/apt-packages.txt

These packages and others are required for Debian Stretch.  First, install these packages:

sudo apt-get install $(grep -vE "^\s*#" requirements/system/ubuntu/apt-packages.txt   | tr "\n" " ")

And then install these packages:

sudo apt-get install python-scipy python-numpy build-essential python-dev gfortran libfreetype6-dev libjpeg-dev libtiff5-dev zlib1g-dev libpng-dev  libxml2-dev libxslt-dev yui-compressor graphviz libgraphviz-dev graphviz-dev mysql-server libmysqlclient-dev libgeos-dev libreadline7 libreadline7-dev mongodb nodejs mysql-client virtualenvwrapper libgeos-ruby1.8 lynx-cur libxmlsec1-dev swig  libsqlclient-dev libxmlsec1

Like the photo? See a bigger version on Flickr.