How To Install Moodle on Ubuntu 14.04

In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Moodle on Ubuntu 14.04. 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. I will show you the step-by-step installation of Moodle on the Ubuntu 14.04 server.

Prerequisites

• A server running one of the following operating systems: Ubuntu 14.04 LTS.
• 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 14.04

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

apt-get update -y

Step 2. Install the LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) server and include some PHP extensions.

apt-get -y install apache2 mysql-server mysql-client php5 php5-mysql
apt-get -y install graphviz aspell php5-pspell php5-curl php5-gd php5-intl php5-mysql php5-xmlrpc php5-ldap

Start Apache and MySQL services:

/etc/init.d/apache2 start
/etc/init.d/mysql start

Step 3. Configuring MySQL.

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

Add the following line in the my.cnf file under [mysqld] section and restart MySQL service:

## nano /etc/mysql/my.cnf
binlog_format = ROW

Restart MySQL services:

service mysqld restart

Create a new MySQL database for our Moodle installation:

## mysql -uroot -p
mysql> CREATE DATABASE moodle;
mysql> GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON moodle.* TO 'moodleuser'@'localhost' IDENTIFIED BY 'moodleuser_passwd';
mysql> FLUSH PRIVILEGES;
mysql> quit

Step 4. Install Moodle.

Setup your local repository and clone the git repository from GitHub using the following commands:

cd /opt
sudo git clone git://git.moodle.org/moodle.git
cd moodle
sudo git branch -a
sudo git branch --track MOODLE_26_STABLE origin/MOODLE_26_STABLE
sudo git checkout MOODLE_26_STABLE

Copy local repository to /var/www/html/:

sudo cp -R /opt/moodle /var/www/html/
sudo mkdir /var/www/moodledata
sudo chown -R www-data /var/www/moodledata
sudo chmod -R 777 /var/www/moodledata
sudo chmod -R 0755 /var/www/html/moodle

Step 5. Accessing Moodle.

Moodle will be available on HTTP port 80 by default. Open your favorite browser and navigate to http://yourdomain.com/moodle or http://your-server-ip/moodle. Important: If you are not comfortable using the terminal to create the config.php file that needs to be created when going through the installer, you should temporarily make the webroot writable by doing the following:

chmod -R 777 /var/www/html/moodle

After you have run the installer and you have Moodle setup, you NEED to revert permissions so that it is no longer writable using the below command:

chmod -R 0755 /var/www/html/moodle

Congratulations! You have successfully installed Moodle. Thanks for using this tutorial for installing Moodle on Ubuntu 14.04 system. For additional help or useful information, we recommend you to check the official Moodle website.

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