Install Moodle on Ensim

This tutorial will cover Moodle’s 1.9.2 installation on a server running Ensim 4.x – 10.x / PHP5 / MySQL 4.1 – 5.2 (as root)

“Moodle is a course management system (CMS) – a free, Open Source software package designed using sound pedagogical principles, to help educators create effective online learning communities.” For more info go to Moodle’s official website.

1. First check your server meets the specifications listed. You will need additional packages and can be found here.

2. wget http://download.moodle.org/stable19/moodle-1.9.2.tgz on /home/virtual/siteX/fst/var/www/html/

3. tar zxf moodle-1.9.2.tgz

4. chown -R adminX:adminX moodle

5. mkdir ../moodledata

6. chown -R apache:apache ../moodledata

7. Create a MySQL database for moodle. I.E. domain_com_moodle

8. Go to http://www.domain.com/moodle/install.php , select your language installation and ***WAIT***, check what it’s needed. Everything will look fine and you should only see 2 warnings about PHP low file uploads limit and PHP safe mode.

pico or vi /etc/php.ini and verify the following values are set like this:

safe_mode = Off
safe_mode_gid = Off
memory_limit = 24M  ; Let moodle suck some memory;)
upload_max_filesize = 16M  ; 8M is the default however is kinda small, set it to whatever you might need

* If you don’t want to mess with global values then edit the php.ini located at /home/virtual/siteX/fst/etc/php.ini

9. Restart HTTPD: service httpd restart

10. Refresh the page http://www.domain.com/moodle/install.php and check everything is fine. If you still see the Safe Mode warning then edit /etc/httpd/conf/httpd20_app.conf and find the line “php_admin_flag safe_mode on”, change it to “php_admin_flag safe_mode off” and restart HTTPD again.

11. Refresh the page http://www.domain.com/moodle/install.php and EVERYTHING now should be fine, if not please go back to http://docs.moodle.org/en/Installing_Moodle and dig more.

12. Now you can continue with the installation process. It should go smooth and it will ask you to copy the config file because the script has no access to write. Just copy the text, create a file “config.php” on the moodle directory and chown adminX:adminX config.php , continue with installation.

13. Once installation is done you can go to http://www.domain.com/moodle and login as admin with password admin, get inside ASAP and change the login and admin password 🙂

Now your Moodle is up and running, have fun!

* For some users this mini-howto can be silly but still Ensim makes some applications hard to install because of it’s nature.
* If something goes wrong, don’t blame me, this is only an un-official guide.

Happy Moodlin’ 🙂

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