How To Install Moodle on CentOS 7

In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Moodle on CentOS 7. 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 a CentOS 7 server.

Prerequisites

• A server running one of the following operating systems: CentOS 7.
• 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 CentOS 7

Step 1. First of all, make sure that all packages are up to date.

yum -y update

Step 2. Install the LAMP server and include some PHP extensions.

yum install httpd mariadb mariadb-server php php-mysql
yum install php-iconv php-mbstring php-curl php-openssl php-tokenizer php-xmlpc php-soap php-ctype php-zip php-gd php-simplexml php-spl php-pcre php-dom php-xml php-intl php-json php-ldap php-pecl-apc -y

Start LAMP services and add them to automatically start on your system start-up using:

systemctl restart httpd
systemctl enable httpd
systemctl start mariadb
systemctl enable mariadb

Step 3. Configuring MariaDB.

By default, MariaDB 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 MariaDB.

mysql_secure_installation

Next, we will need to log in to the MariaDB 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 MariaDB root password and hit Enter. Once you are logged in to your database server you need to create a database for Moodle installation:

mysql> CREATE DATABASE moodle;
mysql> GRANT ALL ON moodle.* TO 'moodle'@'localhost' IDENTIFIED BY 'secretpassword';
mysql> FLUSH PRIVILEGES;
mysql> quit

Step 4. Install Moodle.

Download the latest stable version of Moodle, At the moment of writing this article it is version 2.9.1:

wget https://download.moodle.org/download.php/stable29/moodle-latest-29.zip
tar -zxvf moodle-latest-28.tgz

If your server is dedicated to hosting only moodle sites, copy the contents of your moodle directory to /var/www/html/ the directory. In this case, your moodle website URL will be www.your-site.com.

Create a data directory for Moodle:

mkdir /var/www/moodledata/
chmod 777 /var/www/moodledata/

We will need to change some folders permissions:

chown -R apache:apache /var/www/moodledata

Restart Apache for the changes to take effect:

systemctl restart httpd

Step 5. Accessing Moodle.

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

Congratulations! You have successfully installed Moodle. Thanks for using this tutorial for installing Moodle open-source course management system in CentOS 7. For additional help or useful information, we recommend you to check the official Moodle website.