Installing Moodle

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Firstly don't panic! :-)

This guide explains how to install Moodle for the first time. For some of these steps it
goes into a lot of detail to try and cover the majority of possible web server setups, so this
page may look long and complicated. Don't panic, once you know how to do it you can
install Moodle in minutes!

If you have problems please read this page carefully - most common issues are answered
in here. If you still have trouble, you can seek help from the Moodle community via
moodle.org Using Moodle.

Another option is to contact a Moodle Partner providing Moodle hosting who can
completely maintain Moodle for you, so that you can ignore all this and get straight into
educating! A Moodle partner is the preferred option but if you decide to choose a hosting
company that has cpanel then this tutorial will guide you through the process of choosing
a host and setting up moodle via cpanel (not currently available).

Warning: some hosting companies offer one-click moodle install options, which whilst
sometimes effective, usually use old (sometimes years old) versions of moodle and
sometimes simply don't work. If one of these goes wrong, your best bet is often to start
from scratch following the instructions here yourself. Its almost certainly quicker.

If you want to run Moodle on your own computer and this page looks a bit daunting, then
please see our guides: Installing Apache, MySQL and PHP(AMP) or how to install one
of Moodle's complete packages. They provide alternative instructions to install all this on
most popular platforms.
Table of Contents

Contents
[hide]

• 1 Table of Contents
• 2 Requirements
• 3 How many users?
• 4 Download and copy files into place
o 4.1 Structure of moodle directory
• 5 Setting-up your system
o 5.1 Check web server settings
o 5.2 Recheck PHP settings
o 5.3 Using a .htaccess file for webserver and PHP settings
o 5.4 Creating an empty database
ƒ 5.4.1 Using a hosted server
ƒ 5.4.2 Using the command line
o 5.5 Creating the data directory
• 6 Run the installer script to create config.php
• 7 Go to the admin page to continue configuration
• 8 Installing Moodle Using Command Line
• 9 Set up cron
• 10 Set up backups
• 11 Create a new course
• 12 See also
Requirements
Moodle is primarily developed in Linux using Apache, MySQL and PHP (also
sometimes known as the LAMP platform), but is also regularly tested with Windows
XP/2000/2003 (WAMP), Solaris 10 (Sparc and x64), Mac OS X and Netware 6 operating
systems. Support for PostgreSQL, Oracle and Microsoft SQL Server is also available.

The procedure for installing Moodle on the Windows platform (e.g. Windows Server, IIS
and MSSQL) varies slightly to the procedure for the LAMP platform. See Installation for
Windows 2003 with IIS for more details.

Blank page problem while installing Moodle on Windows Vista may occur;
following these steps: Installing Moodle on Windows Vista might help.

Note if you are using a hosted account: Most web hosts support all of these
requirements by default. You should contact your web host's support desk to check that
this is the case before signing-up with them. It is especially important to ask about any
PHP memory limits or MySQL question limits. If your prospective host does not provide
a service which meets these requirements, or you are already signed up with them, ask
them why and consider taking your business elsewhere if they do not change.

The requirements for Moodle are as follows:

Hardware (unless you are using a hosted server).

• Disk space: 160MB free (min). You will require more free space to store your
teaching materials.
• Memory: 256MB (min), 1GB (recommended). The general rule of thumb is that
Moodle can support 50 concurrent users for every 1GB of RAM, but this will
vary depending on your specific hardware and software combination.

Software

• Web server software. Most people use Apache, but Moodle should work fine
under any web server that supports PHP, such as IIS on Windows platforms. PHP
does impose requirements on versions of web servers, however these are complex
and the general advice is to use the newest version possible of your chosen web
server.
• PHP scripting language. (Please note that there have been issues installing
Moodle with PHP-Accelerator). There are currently two versions (or branches) of
PHP available: PHP4 and PHP5 and the version requirements are listed below.
o For Moodle version 1.4 or later: PHP4 (version 4.1.0 or later) or PHP5
(version 5.1.0 or later) are supported.
o For Moodle version 1.6 or later: the PHP4 (version 4.3.0 or later) or PHP5
(version 5.1.0 or later) are supported.
 o Future Moodle versions 2.0 or later will not support PHP4 and will require
PHP5 (version 5.2.0 or later).
o PHP Settings. Check these settings in your php.ini or .htaccess file (if
you're using Apache). For settings which use ON/OFF as their values, you
can substitute 1 for ON and 0 for OFF if you prefer.
ƒ safe_mode needs to be OFF.
ƒ memory_limit should be at least 16M (32M is recommended for
Moodle 1.7 and 40M for Moodle 1.8 or later). Large sites may
need more than 128M. PHP 5.2.x requires higher memory_limit
values than previous versions of PHP. 64bit operating systems
require even more memory.
ƒ session.save_handler needs to be set to FILES.
ƒ magic_quotes_gpc should be ON. (It will be recommended to turn
it off in 2.0.)
ƒ magic_quotes_runtime needs to be OFF.
ƒ file_uploads needs to be ON.
ƒ session.auto_start needs to be OFF.
ƒ session.bug_compat_warn needs to be OFF.
o PHP Extensions and libraries
ƒ The mbstring extension is recommended for Moodle 1.6 or later.
ƒ The iconv extension is recommended for Moodle 1.6 or later.
ƒ GD library and the FreeType 2 library and extensions are needed
to be able to look at the dynamic graphs that the logs pages make.
ƒ The mysql extension is required if you are using the MySQL
database. Note that in some Linux distributions (notably Red Hat)
this is an optional installation.
ƒ The pgsql extension is required if you are using the PostgreSQL
database.
ƒ The zlib extension is required for zip/unzip functionality.
ƒ The curl extension is recommended for Moodle 1.8 or later.
ƒ The tokenizer extension is recommended for Moodle 1.8 or later.
ƒ The curl and openssl extensions are required for the Moodle
network functionality (Moodle 1.8 or later).
ƒ Other PHP extensions may be required to support optional Moodle
functionality, especially external authentication and/or enrolment
(e.g. LDAP extension for LDAP authentication and the sockets
extension for Chat server).
• A working database server: MySQL or PostgreSQL are completely supported and
recommended for use with any version of Moodle. Support for Microsoft SQL
Server and Oracle has been added in Moodle 1.7. MySQL is the choice for many
people because it is very popular, but there are some arguments in favour of
PostgreSQL, especially if you are planning a large deployment.
o For Moodle 1.5, MySQL (version 3.23 or later) or PostgreSQL (7.4 or
later).
o For Moodle 1.6, MySQL (version 4.1.12 or later) or PostgreSQL (7.4 or
later).
 o For Moodle 1.7, MySQL (version 4.1.12 or later), PostgreSQL (7.4 or
later) or Microsoft SQL Server 2005 (version 9 or SQL Server Express
2005)
o For Moodle 1.8 or later, MySQL (version 4.1.12 or later), PostgreSQL
(8.0 or later) or Microsoft SQL Server 2005 (version 9 or SQL Server
Express 2005)

MySQL Notes: For Moodle 1.6 or later, If you use latin languages only you can
use MySQL 4.1.12. If you are using non-latin languages you require MySQL
4.1.16 or later. Currently the MySQL setting "strict mode" must be OFF (set to ""
or "MYSQL40") in the MySQL configuration file.
PostgreSQL Notes: PostgreSQL 7.4 is recommended for earlier Moodle versions,
since Moodle 1.8 only PostgreSQL 8.0 and above are supported.

Table of Contents
How many users?
In addition to the hardware and software requirements, you will also need to think about
the capacity of your Moodle installation in terms of the number of users it can handle.
There are two numbers to plan for:

• Browsing users: the maximum number of users able to browse your Moodle site.
This is the number of computers in your organization or on your course
(whichever is greater).
• Concurrent database users: the maximum number of concurrent database users
(needed for Moodle activities such as quizzes). This is the number of users who
will be using Moodle at the same time. In an educational institution, use your
timetable/roster to obtain this figure.

Once you know these figures for your users, you can start work out if your Moodle
installation can support this capacity. The exact number of users depends on your
hardware/software/network combination. Usually the amount of memory installed
(RAM) is the deciding factor but a faster overall processor speed will also help in
reducing waiting times for pages to load.

The general rule of thumb for a single server is that the approx max concurrent users =
RAM (GB) * 50 and the approx max browsing users = Approx max concurrent users * 5.
As an example, a university with 500 total computers on campus and 100 concurrent
users at any time will need approx 2GB of RAM on the one server to support the number
of concurrent users.

Note if you are using a hosted account: Ask your provider what limits are placed on the
number of concurrent database connections and the processor load. This will give a good
estimate of the number of users your Moodle install can manage.

Note: As of August 31, 2007, Moodle 1.8.2+ is not recommended for large installations,
especially if you have large number (e.g. 20,000+) of courses. The main reason is the
codes related to ROLES are still not fully optimized with database queries and still need
some work. If you are planning to use 1.8.x codes for a larger institution, please make
sure that you have sufficient time to do your own testing and performance profiling.
Upgrade to Moodle 1.9!!

[Update] This performance issue has been improved quite a bit in the most recent 1.8.3+
version (see this thread discussion: http://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=83281).
Moodle 1.9 has even more improvements in all areas and is the recommended version.

Table of Contents
Download and copy files into place
There are two ways to get Moodle, either as a compressed package or via CVS.

• There are two types of compressed packages on the download page:

http://download.moodle.org/, the standard distribution with Moodle only files and
the complete install, which contains programs to operate Moodle in a web
environment.
• To use CVS, helpful instructions are available at the CVS for Administrators
page. The full Moodle CVS repository is also available for browsing.

After downloading, unpack the archive using either

tar -zxvf [filename]

or

unzip [filename]

as appropriate.

If using CVS, run the CVS Checkout command.

You will now be left with a directory called "moodle", containing a number of files and
folders.

You can either place the whole folder in your web server documents directory, in which
case the site will be located at http://yourwebserver.com/moodle, or you can copy all
the contents straight into the main web server documents directory, in which case the site
will be simply http://yourwebserver.com.

If you are downloading Moodle to your local computer and then uploading it to your web
site, it is usually better to upload the whole archive as one file, and then do the unpacking
on the server. Even web hosting interfaces like cPanel allow you to uncompress archives
in the "File Manager".

Structure of moodle directory

You can safely skip this section, but here is a quick summary of the contents of the
Moodle folder, to help get you oriented:

config.php - contains basic settings. This file does not come with Moodle - you
will create it.
install.php - the script you will run to create config.php
version.php - defines the current version of Moodle code
index.php - the front page of the site
 admin/ - code to administrate the whole server
auth/ - plugin modules to authenticate users
blocks/ - plugin modules for the little side blocks on many pages
calendar/ - all the code for managing and displaying calendars
course/ - code to display and manage courses
doc/ - help documentation for Moodle (eg this page)
files/ - code to display and manage uploaded files
lang/ - texts in different languages, one directory per language
lib/ - libraries of core Moodle code
login/ - code to handle login and account creation
mod/ - all the main Moodle course modules are in here
pix/ - generic site graphics
theme/ - theme packs/skins to change the look of the site.
user/ - code to display and manage users

Table of Contents
Setting-up your system
To ensure that Moodle will install successfully, you need to check that the web server
settings are correct, then create a blank database for Moodle to use and finally create a
directory on your hard disk for Moodle to save your materials and other files you upload
into your courses.

Check web server settings

• Firstly, make sure that your web server is set up to use index.php as a default page
(perhaps in addition to index.html, default.htm and so on). In Apache, this is done
using a DirectoryIndex parameter in your httpd.conf file. Mine usually looks like
this:

DirectoryIndex index.php index.html index.htm

Just make sure index.php is in the list (and preferably towards the start of the list,
for efficiency).

• Secondly, if you are using Apache 2, then you should turn on the AcceptPathInfo
variable, which allows scripts to be passed arguments like
http://server/file.php/arg1/arg2. This is essential to allow relative links between
your resources, and also provides a performance boost for people using your
Moodle web site. You can turn this on by adding these lines to your httpd.conf
file. (NB: This setting, or any equivalent, is not required in Apache 1)

AcceptPathInfo on

Recheck PHP settings

Moodle requires a number of PHP settings to be active for it to work. These were given
in the Requirements section and On most servers these will already be the default
settings. However, some PHP servers (and some of the more recent PHP versions) may
have things set differently, so it is useful to double-check that the settings are correct.
These are defined in PHP's configuration file (usually called php.ini) or in the Apache
.htaccess file:

safe_mode = 0 (necessary)
memory_limit = 40M (varies: minimum 16M, 32M Moodle v1.7, 40M Moodle
v1.8, 128M large sites)
session.save_handler = files (unless you are using another handler,
e.g. mm)
magic_quotes_gpc = 1 (preferred but not necessary, 0 will be
recommended in 2.0)
magic_quotes_runtime = 0 (necessary)
file_uploads = 1
session.auto_start = 0
session.bug_compat_warn = 0
You may also want to set other, optional php.ini file settings while you are already
editing it. For instance, you may want to reset the maximum upload size of file
attachments, which usually defaults to 2M(egabytes). For instance, to set these to 16
Megabytes:

post_max_size = 16M
upload_max_filesize = 16M

Table of Contents
Using a .htaccess file for webserver and PHP settings

Use the above if you can directly edit your server's files, but if you are setting-up Moodle
on a webhost, or don't have access to httpd.conf or php.ini on your server, or you have
Moodle on a server with other applications that require different settings, then don't
worry, you can often still override the default settings. This only works on Apache
servers and only when Overrides have been allowed in the main Apache configuration.
Moodle is supplied with a htaccess file which you can use, or you can create your own
file manually.

• Use the default htaccess file. The easiest thing to do is just copy the sample file
from moodle/lib/htaccess and edit it to suit your needs. It contains further
instructions. For example, in a Unix shell:

cd moodle
cp moodle/lib/htaccess .htaccess

• Create your own file. Alternatively you can create your own file called .htaccess
in Moodle's main directory that contains lines like the following.

DirectoryIndex index.php index.html index.htm

php_value memory_limit 40M (adjust to your version of Moodle)
php_flag magic_quotes_gpc 1
php_flag magic_quotes_runtime 0
php_flag file_uploads 1
php_flag session.auto_start 0
php_flag session.bug_compat_warn 0
If you have Apache version 2 installed, add these lines:
<IfDefine APACHE2>
AcceptPathInfo on
</IfDefine>
Otherwise add this single line:
AcceptPathInfo on
Optionally, you can also do things like define the maximum size for uploaded
files, etc by adding these lines:
LimitRequestBody 0
php_value upload_max_filesize 2M
php_value post_max_size 2M
The value given in these lines is 2M. You may want to change this at a later date
to allow uploading of larger files.

Several hosting services that uses Apache 2 and php 5.x does not allow php flags and
values to be set from within .htaccess file. It may be necessary to place a php.ini file
within each sub-directory of the site :-( .
 1. Make one php.ini file in the main moodle directory tree and later copy it to all
sub-directories. the syntax is a little bit different than the one used in .htaccess.
(see sample after section 2)
2. Run the script http://tips-scripts.com/php_ini_copy or copy php.ini manually to all
sub-directories.

php.ini (sample):
upload_max_filesize = 2M
post_max_size = 2M

• Before you go into this adventure make sure you really need those php
instructions in your site.

• Note: Use a .htaccess file only as a last resort as it can have an impact on the
performance of your Moodle site and cause pages to load slowly on your browser.

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Creating an empty database

You need to create an empty database (eg "moodle") in your database system along with
a special user (eg "moodleuser") that has access to that database (and that database only).
You could use the "root" user if you wanted to for a test server, but this is not
recommended for a production system: if hackers manage to discover the password then
your whole database system would be at risk, rather than just one database.

Warning: Bear in mind that, as of Moodle version 1.5.x, Moodle doesn't work
with MySQL 5.x's strict mode setting (STRICT_TRANS_TABLES and/or
STRICT_ALL_TABLES) -- see forum discussion. So if you are using MySQL
5.x, edit MySQL's configuration file (called "my.ini" in Windows and "my.cnf"
on Unix/Linux) and comment out that option or set it to
sql-mode=''
. You have to restart MySQL after changing this setting.

If you do not have access to your server, use PHPMyAdmin (or another MySQL
client) and enter the command
SET @@global.sql_mode='';
(be sure to use single quotes, and don't forget the semicolon).
Using a hosted server

If you are using a webhost, they will probably have a control panel web interface for you
to create your database.

The cPanel system is one of the most popular of these. To create a database using cPanel:

1. Click on the MySQL Databases icon.

2. Type moodle in the New Database field and click Create Database.
3. Type a username and password (not one you use elsewhere) in the respective
fields and click Create User.
Note that the username and database names may be prefixed by your cPanel
account name and an underscore, and truncated to 16 characters. When entering
this information into the Moodle installer - use the full names.
4. Now use the Add Users to Databases button and give this new user account
ALL rights to the new database.

Continue with Creating the data directory

Using the command line

If you have access to Unix or Windows command lines then you can do the same sort of
thing by typing commands. You should do this using the MySQL Client program as
follows (commands which you type-in are shown in bold):

- Start the MySQL Client program:

#mysql -u root -p
Enter password:
Welcome to the MySQL monitor. Commands end with ; or \g.
Your MySQL connection id is 2 to server version: 5.0.22-log

Type 'help;' or '\h' for help. Type '\c' to clear the buffer.

mysql>

- The prompt changes to "mysql>" to indicate that you are now working in the MySQL
Client program. When working in MySQL, all commands which you type-in must end in
a semi-colon. (If you hit the Enter key without the final semi-colon, you'll get the line
continuation symbol '->'; this is your second chance to type the semi-colon and hit Enter.)

- Begin by checking for any existing databases called "moodle" - if there are any you
should change the name in all the commands which follow:

mysql> SHOW DATABASES;

+-------------------------+
| Database |
+-------------------------+
| information_schema |
| mysql |
| test |
+-------------------------+
3 rows in set (0.03 sec)

- Create a database to store the Moodle tables. We'll call this "moodle", as there are none
with that name already in the above list, but change it if you need to.

mysql> CREATE DATABASE moodle;

Query OK, 1 row affected (0.00 sec)

- Change the default character set and collation of the "moodle" database to UTF8. Leave
this out if you are installing Moodle 1.5 or earlier):

mysql> ALTER DATABASE moodle DEFAULT CHARACTER SET utf8 COLLATE

utf8_unicode_ci;
Query OK, 1 row affected (0.00 sec)

- Create a username and password to access the database "moodle" and grant database
access permissions. We'll call the user "moodleuser" and set the password as
"yourpassword". It's a good idea to change these for your installation however most
people keep the username as "moodleuser". Remember the username and password you
have set, as you'll need it in the configuration screens later. This is a long command so
has been split over several lines by pressing the Return key.

mysql> GRANT SELECT,INSERT,UPDATE,DELETE,CREATE,CREATE TEMPORARY

TABLES,
-> DROP,INDEX,ALTER ON moodle.*
-> TO moodleuser@localhost IDENTIFIED BY 'yourpassword';
Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.01 sec)
Security Warnings: Never leave the password as the one shown here. Make sure
you have a strong password (a mixture of letters and numbers, upper and lower
case). Avoid granting "ALL" permissions on the database.
Note: For MySQL 4.0.1 or earlier, you don't need the CREATE TEMPORARY
TABLES permission.

- Exit the MySQL Client program:

mysql> QUIT
Bye
#

- Reload the grant tables using the mysqladmin program:

#mysqladmin -u root -p reload

Enter password:
#

And some example command lines for PostgreSQL:

# su - postgres
> psql -c "create user moodleuser createdb;" template1
> psql -c "create database moodle with encoding 'unicode';" -U
moodleuser template1
> psql -c "alter user moodleuser nocreatedb;" template1
> psql -c "alter user moodleuser with encrypted password
'yourpassword';" template1
> su - root
# /etc/init.d/postgresql reload

If the Postgres create database command above (>psql -c "create database moodle...")
gives an error message you may want to try:

psql -c "create database moodle with template=template1 encoding =

'unicode' owner = moodleuser
location = '/var/mydata';"

If the create database command asks you for a password, run the line containing
'encrypted password' first before proceeding.

See also:

• Step-by-step instructions on installation for Ubuntu(Debian)

Table of Contents
Creating the data directory

Moodle will also need some space on your server's hard disk to store uploaded files, such
as course documents and user pictures. The Moodle installer tries hard to create the
moodledata directory for you but if it fails then you will have to create a directory for
this purpose manually.

Security warning: For security purposes, it is CRITICAL that this directory is NOT
accessible directly via the web. The easiest way to do this is to simply locate it OUTSIDE
the web site root directory (it is the folder that the main part of your URL -that is, the part
up to the first single / - points to; for example, in
http://your.domain.com/moodle/admin/cron.php, it is http://your.domain.com/).

But if you must have it in the web directory (and you are using Apache AND the web
server configuration allows .htaccess files to restrict access to directories) then protect it
by creating a file in the data directory called .htaccess, containing these lines:

order deny,allow
deny from all

If you are using IIS, you need to edit the properties of the data directory (from the
Internet Information Services Manager console) and deny access to that folder to
everybody from the web.

If you don't protect the data directory from direct web access, anybody will be able
to impersonate any user of your Moodle site (including the admin user!!!), and all of
your course materials will be available to the web at large.

Ownership & Permissions: To make sure that Moodle can save uploaded files in this
directory, check that the web server software has permission to read, write and execute in
this directory. On Unix machines, this means setting the owner of the directory to be
something like "nobody" or "apache", and then giving that user read, write and execute
permissions. As an example, to change the owner to "nobody" you could use:

chown -R nobody:apache moodledata

To change the permissions so that the owner has read,write and execute permissions, use
something like this:

chmod -R 0770 moodledata

Note: If you are receiving permission denied messages, try chmod -R 0770 moodledata
and then adjust the settings so that they are more secure. A more secure setting is chmod -
R 0750 moodledata. According to the comments in config-dist.php, "On hosting systems
you might need to make sure that your group has no permissions at all while others have
full permissions." To do this you could use chmod -R 707 moodledata. See also the
security page.

Remember that by default moodle will issue a warning about moodle data directories
created inside the web directory, but otherwise this directory can be located where you
wish. You can later move or change the location of this directory, but if you do, be sure
to edit the setting in the config.php file that sets this; e.g. if moodledata is under a
directory called data, then it would look like this:

$CFG->dataroot = '/data/moodledata';
CPanel and webhosts

On cPanel systems you can use the "File Manager" to find the folder, click on it, then
choose "Change Permissions". On many shared hosting servers, you will probably need
to restrict all file access to your "group" (to prevent other webhost customers from
looking at or changing your files), but provide full read/write access to everyone else
(which will allow the web server to access your files). Speak to your server administrator
if you are having trouble setting this up securely. In particular it will not be possible to
create a usable data directory on sites that use a PHP feature known as "Safe Mode".

Table of Contents
Run the installer script to create config.php
To run the installer script (install.php), just try to access your Moodle main URL using a
web browser, or access http://yourserver/install.php directly.

(The Installer will try to set a session cookie. If you get a popup warning in your browser
make sure you accept that cookie!)

Moodle will detect that configuration is necessary and will lead you through some
screens to help you create a new configuration file called config.php. At the end of the
process Moodle will try and write the file into the right location, otherwise you can press
a button to download it from the installer and then upload config.php into the main
Moodle directory on the server.

Along the way the installer will test your server environment and give you suggestions
about how to fix any problems. For most common issues these suggestions should be
sufficient, but if you get stuck, check in the Installation Forum for more help.

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Go to the admin page to continue configuration
Once the basic config.php has been correctly created in the previous step, trying to access
the front page of your site will take you to the "admin" page for the rest of the
configuration.

The first time you access this admin page, you will be presented with a GPL "shrink
wrap" agreement with which you must agree before you can continue with the setup.

Now Moodle will start setting up your database and creating tables to store data. Firstly,
the main database tables are created. You should see a number of SQL statements
followed by status messages that look like this:

CREATE TABLE course (

id int(10) unsigned NOT NULL auto_increment,
category int(10) unsigned NOT NULL default '0',
password varchar(50) NOT NULL default '',
fullname varchar(254) NOT NULL default '',
shortname varchar(15) NOT NULL default '',
summary text NOT NULL,
format tinyint(4) NOT NULL default '1',
teacher varchar(100) NOT NULL default 'Teacher',
startdate int(10) unsigned NOT NULL default '0',
enddate int(10) unsigned NOT NULL default '0',
timemodified int(10) unsigned NOT NULL default '0',
PRIMARY KEY (id)
) TYPE=MyISAM;

SUCCESS

...and so on, followed by: Main databases set up successfully.

If you don't see these, then there must have been some problem with the database or the
configuration settings you defined in config.php. Check that PHP isn't in a restricted
"Safe Mode" (commercial web hosts sometimes have safe mode turned on). You can
check PHP variables by creating a little file containing <?php phpinfo() ?> and looking
at it through a browser. Check all these and try this page again.

Scroll down the very bottom of the page and press the "Continue" link.

You should now see a form where you can define more configuration variables for your
installation, such as the default language, SMTP hosts and so on. Don't worry too much
about getting everything right just now - you can always come back and edit these later
on using the admin interface. The defaults are designed to be useful and secure for most
sites. Scroll down to the bottom and click "Save changes".

If (and only if) you find yourself getting stuck on this page, unable to continue, then your
server probably has what I call the "buggy referrer" problem. This is easy to fix: just turn
off the "secureforms" setting, then try to continue again.
Next you will see more pages that print lots of status messages as they set up all the
tables required by the various Moodle module. As before, they should all be green.

Scroll down the very bottom of the page and press the "Continue" link.

The next page is a form where you can define parameters for your Moodle site and the
front page, such as the name, format, description and so on. Fill this out (you can always
come back and change these later) and then press "Save changes".

Finally, you will then be asked to create a top-level administration user for future access
to the admin pages. Fill out the details with your own name, email etc and then click
"Save changes". Not all the fields are required, but if you miss any important fields you'll
be re-prompted for them.

Make sure you remember the username and password you chose for the
administration user account, as they will be necessary to access the administration
page in future.

(If for any reason your install is interrupted, or there is a system error of some kind that
prevents you from logging in using the admin account, you can usually log in using the
default username of "admin", with password "admin".)

Once successful, you will be returned to the home page of your new site! Note the
administration links that appear down the left hand side of the page (these items also
appear on a separate Admin page) - these items are only visible to you because you are
logged in as the admin user. All your further administration of Moodle can now be done
using this menu, such as:

• creating and deleting courses

• creating and editing user accounts
• administering teacher accounts
• changing site-wide settings like themes etc

But you are not done installing yet! There is one very important thing still to do (see the
next section on cron).

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Installing Moodle Using Command Line
Installing Moodle Using command line is just as easy as installing Moodle using web
browser.

• First Go to the moodle root directory and then to admin directory inside the
moodle root.

$cd /var/www/html/moodle/admin

• Then simply use the following syntax to run the moodle command line installer

$php cliupgrade.php --lang=en --webaddr=http://www.example.com --

moodledir=/var/www/html/moodle --datadir=/var/moodledata --dbtype=mysql
--dbhost=localhost --dbname=moodle --dbuser=root --prefix=mdl --
verbose=1 --interactivelevel=2

More information about the options can be found using $php cliupgrad.php --help

Then you will see the following list of available options

--lang Valid installed language for

installation. Default is English(en)
--webaddr Web address for the Moodle site
--moodledir Location of the moodle web folder
--datadir Location of the moodle data folder
(should not be web visible)
--dbtype Database type. Default it mysql
--dbhost Database host. Default localhost
--dbname Database name. Default is moodle
--dbuser Database user. Default is blank
--dbpass Database password. Default is blank
--prefix Table prefix for above database
tables. Default is mdl
--verbose 0 No output, 1 Summarized
output(Default), 2 Detailed output
--interactivelevel 0 Non interactive, 1 Semi
interactive(Default), 2 Interactive
--help print out this help

When you choose non interactive mode without any options all the default values are
assumed.

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Set up cron
Moodle's background tasks (e.g. sending out forum emails and performing course
backups) are performed by a script which you can set to execute at specific times of the
day. This is known as a cron script. Please refer to the Cron instructions.

Set up backups
Please refer to the backup instructions.

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Create a new course

Now that Moodle is running properly, you can try creating a new course to play with.

Select "Create a new course" from the Admin page (or the admin links on the home
page).

Fill out the form, paying special attention to the course format. You don't have to worry
about the details too much at this stage, as everything can be changed later by the teacher.
Note that the yellow help icons are everywhere to provide contextual help on any aspect.

Press "Save changes", and you will be taken to a new form where you can assign teachers
to the course. You can only add existing user accounts from this form - if you want to
create a new teacher account then either ask the teacher to create one for themselves (see
the login page), or create one for them using the "Add a new user" on the Admin page.

Once done, the course is ready to customize, and is accessible via the "Courses" link on
the home page.

Retrieved from "http://docs.moodle.org/en/Installing_Moodle"