How to Setup Moodle 2.8 on CentOS/RHEL 7/6/5

Moodle is an Open Source Course Management System, It’s also known as a Learning Management System (LMS) or a Virtual Learning Environment (VLE). This tutorial will help you to install Moodle on CentOS/RHEL Systems

Installing Required Packages

Install order to setup Moodle we need a Web Server, Database Server and PHP with required modules. Use below link to install following packages.

Installing Apache, MySQL and PHP on CentOS/RedHat 6/5

Install required PHP modules using yum package manager.

# yum install git php-common php-mysql php-gd php-intl php-curl
# yum install php-ldap php-apc php-mbstring php-dom php-soap php-xmlrpc

To install git version 1.9 use article Install Git 1.9 on CentOS/RHEL

Download Moodle Latest Source

Moodle complete code is available under git repository. So we can directory make a clone of repository to our local system using following commands.

# mkdir /var/moodle
# cd /var/moodle
# git clone git://git.moodle.org/moodle.git www

After finishing Moodle git clone, checkout the latest branch of Moodle available in git. At the time of updating this article current Moodle version is 2.8.3 so we specified in below command.

# cd www
# git checkout origin/MOODLE_28_STABLE

Click here to find latest available version of Moodle.

Create Moodle Data directory using following command. Moodle use this directory for storing data of application. We recommend to keep this directory outside of Moodle application.

# mkdir /var/moodle/data

Create Moodle Database in MySQL

Moodle supports MySQL 5.1.33, Postgres 8.3, MSSQL 2005, Oracle 10.2 or its higher versions. For this tutorial we are using MySQL.

Use below commands to create Moodle database and user to access database.

# mysql -u root -p

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

Create Moodle Configuration File

Create Moodle configuration file by creating copy of config-dist.php with name config.php in www directory.

# cd /var/moodle/www
# cp config-dist.php config.php

Now edit config.php and make following changes as per you setup details.

$CFG->dbtype    = 'mysqli';
$CFG->dblibrary = 'native';
$CFG->dbhost    = 'localhost';
$CFG->dbname    = 'moodle';
$CFG->dbuser    = 'moodle';
$CFG->dbpass    = 'secretpassword';
$CFG->prefix    = 'mdl_';
$CFG->wwwroot   = 'http://moodle.tecadmin.net';
$CFG->dataroot  = '/var/moodle/data';

Configure Web Server VirtualHost

Add a virtual host in Apache configuration file /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf like below.

<VirtualHost *:80>
    ServerAdmin webmaster@tecadmin.net
    DocumentRoot /var/moodle/www
    ServerName moodle.tecadmin.net
    CustomLog logs/moodle.tecadmin.net_log combined
</VirtualHost>

Updating Moodle web and data directory permissions so that web server can write in it.

# chown -R apache:apache /var/moodle
# chmod -R 755 /var/moodle

Restart Apache Server to reload newly changes made.

# service apache restart

Finally Start Moodle Web Installer

Open Moodle url in browser and follow the steps to complete setup.

Checking required modules are installed.

Installing all Moodle modules. Click continue when complete.

You will get few more steps while running web installer complete all the steps. Finally you will get Moodle running like below.