Book Image

Moodle 4 Administration - Fourth Edition

By : Alex Büchner
Book Image

Moodle 4 Administration - Fourth Edition

By: Alex Büchner

Overview of this book

This updated fourth edition of the classic Moodle Administration guide has been written from the ground up and covers all the new Moodle features in great breadth and depth. The topics have also been augmented with professional diagrams, illustrations, and checklists. The book starts by covering basic tasks such as how to set up and configure Moodle and perform day-to-day administration activities. You’ll then progress to more advanced topics that show you how to customize and extend Moodle, manage authentication and enrolments, and work with roles and capabilities. Next, you'll learn how to configure pedagogical and technical Moodle plugins and ensure your LMS complies with data protection regulations. Then, you will learn how to tighten Moodle’s security, improve its performance, and configure backup and restore procedures. Finally, you'll gain insights on how to compile custom reports, configure learning analytics, enable mobile learning, integrate Moodle via web services, and support different types of multi-tenancy. By the end of this book, you’ll be able to set up an efficient, fully fledged, and secure Moodle system.
Table of Contents (24 chapters)

Configuration reference – an overview

The config.php configuration file contains several settings and variables that heavily influence how Moodle operates. It is located in the main directory of your Moodle system ($CFG->dirroot) and can be edited with any text editor.

Important note

Be careful when modifying config.php! Moodle depends heavily on its content, and any faults can cause the software to malfunction.

You should create a backup of the config file before modifying it, so you can roll back to it in case of problems. Also, ensure the file permissions are correctly set, as the file contains the plain-text database username and password. In a Linux environment, the owner should be root, the group also root, and the permissions set to 644. A sample configuration file is shown in the following screenshot:

Figure A.1 – Sample config.php file

The config.php values we are interested in are the ones that start with a dollar symbol...