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)

Installation in a LAMP environment

Moodle is developed in Linux using Apache, MySQL, and PHP (known as the LAMP stack). If you have a choice, this is the preferred environment to use. There is an ongoing debate about whether PostgreSQL is the more suitable database option, but we will stick with MySQL/MariaDB as this is the system most administrators are familiar with. Also, some organizations are bound to Microsoft SQL or Oracle. If this is the case, please refer to the respective installation guide, as this is beyond the scope of this book.

The high-level installation process is shown in the following process diagram:

Figure 1.4 – Moodle installation process

We will go through each phase in the remaining subsections, covering each installation step in a Linux environment. The process is the same for other operating systems, which we won’t cover; here are some pointers that should get you started:

  • For Windows servers with a small number...