How To Install Moodle on Ubuntu 15.04

In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Moodle on Ubuntu 15.04. For those of you who didn’t know, Moodle is an Open Source Course Management System (CMS), also known as a Learning Management System (LMS) or a Virtual Learning Environment (VLE). It has become very popular among educators around the world as a tool for creating online dynamic websites for their students. Moodle brings features to include assignment submission, online quizzes, wiki, grading, instant messages, discussion boards, and others. But since it’s modular software, it can be extended via plugins to add extra functionality.

This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of Linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS. The installation is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account, if not you may need to add ‘sudo‘ to the commands to get root privileges. I will show you the step-by-step installation of Moodle on an Ubuntu 15.04 server.

Prerequisites

• A server running one of the following operating systems: Ubuntu 15.04.
• It’s recommended that you use a fresh OS install to prevent any potential issues.
• SSH access to the server (or just open Terminal if you’re on a desktop).
• A non-root sudo user or access to the root user. We recommend acting as a non-root sudo user, however, as you can harm your system if you’re not careful when acting as the root.

Install Moodle on Ubuntu 15.04

Step 1. First, make sure that all your system packages are up-to-date by running the following apt-get commands in the terminal.

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade

Step 2. Install LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) server.

A Ubuntu 15.04 LAMP server is required. If you do not have LAMP installed, you can follow our guide here.

Step 3. Installing Moodle.

The first thing to do is to go to Moodle’s download page and download the latest stable version of Moodle, At the moment of writing this article it is version 3.0:

mkdir -p /var/www/html/moodle
cd /var/www/html/moodle
wget https://download.moodle.org/download.php/direct/stable30/moodle-latest-30.tgz
tar -xzvf moodle-latest-30.tgz

We will need to change some folders permissions:

chown -R www-data: /var/www/html/moodle

Create a data directory for Moodle:

mkdir /var/www/moodledata/
chmod 777 /var/www/moodledata/
chown -R www-data: /var/www/moodledata

Step 4. Configuring MySQL for Moodle.

By default, MySQL is not hardened. You can secure MySQL using the mysql_secure_installation script. you should read and below each step carefully which will set a root password, remove anonymous users, disallow remote root login, and remove the test database and access to secure MySQL:

mysql_secure_installation

Configure it like this:

- Set root password? [Y/n] y
- Remove anonymous users? [Y/n] y
- Disallow root login remotely? [Y/n] y
- Remove test database and access to it? [Y/n] y
- Reload privilege tables now? [Y/n] y

Next, we will need to log in to the MySQL console and create a database for Moodle. Run the following command:

mysql -u root -p

This will prompt you for a password, so enter your MySQL root password and hit Enter. Once you are logged in to your database server you need to create a database for Moodle installation:

CREATE DATABASE moodle DEFAULT CHARACTER SET utf8 COLLATE utf8_unicode_ci;
GRANT SELECT,INSERT,UPDATE,DELETE,CREATE,CREATE TEMPORARY TABLES,DROP,INDEX,ALTER ON moodle.* TO moodle_user@localhost IDENTIFIED BY 'YoUrPaSsWoRd';
FLUSH PRIVILEGES;
q

Step 5. Configuring Apache web server for Moodle.

Create a new virtual host directive in Apache. For example, create a new Apache configuration file named ‘moodle.conf’ on your virtual server:

cp /etc/apache2/sites-available/000-default.conf moodle.conf
nano moodle.conf

Add the following lines:

<VirtualHost *:80>
 ServerAdmin admin@yourdomain.com
 DocumentRoot /var/www/html/moodle
 ServerName yourdomain.com
 ServerAlias www.yourdomain.com
 <Directory /var/www/html/moodle/>
Options Indexes FollowSymLinks MultiViews
AllowOverride All
Order allow,deny
allow from all
 </Directory>
 ErrorLog /var/log/httpd/yourdomain.com-error_log
 CustomLog /var/log/httpd/yourdomain.com-access_log common
</VirtualHost>

Now, we can restart the Apache webserver so that the changes take place:

systemctl restart apache2.service

Step 6. Accessing Moodle.

Moodle will be available on HTTP port 80 by default. Open your favorite browser and navigate to http://yourdomain.com or http://server-ip.

Step 1: Select the language
Step 2: Enter the “Data directory (moodledata) path, in our case it is /var/www/moodledata/
Step 3: Choose the database driver, MySQL.
Step 4: Enter the Database settings.

Once Moodle is completely installed on your Ubuntu 15.04, you will need to set up a cron job. Here is a typical cron entry:

* * * * *    /usr/bin/php /var/www/html/moodle/admin/cli/cron.php >/dev/null

Congratulations! You have successfully installed Moodle. Thanks for using this tutorial for installing Moodle on Ubuntu 15.04 system. For additional help or useful information, we recommend you to check the official Moodle website.

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