Linux made for Aarif: Installing Moodle in RHEL, CentOS

Greetings Everyone,

I am pretty sure that most of us know what moodle is and what it does. Moodle is a Course Management System (CMS), also known as a Learning Management System (LMS) or a Virtual Learning Environment (VLE). It is a Free web application that educators can use to create effective online learning sites.

I will now start with the installation process.

First of all we need to have a clean RHEL, CentOS, Scientific Linux or Fedora machine with Apache server installed and you can refer it from my earlier blog LAMP or Apache Server installtion.
Once you have finished installing Apache server we should proceed with moodle installation. Now, we need to download moodle and downloading moodle can be done in various ways but I would prefer downloading it from git. And, yes latest version currently that's the most stable and latest.

# cd /var/www/html

# git clone git://git.moodle.org/moodle.git

# cd moodle
# git branch -a
# git branch --track MOODLE_25_STABLE origin/MOODLE_25_STABLE
# git checkout MOODLE_25_STABLE

Now, lets create a data root for moodle and change permission and ownership

# mkdir /var/www/moodledata

# chown root:apache /var/www/moodledata

# chmod 770 /var/www/moodledata

We will be creating a utf8 database and yes, we are still using mysql

# mysql -u root -p

# your-password

mysql> CREATE DATABASE moodle DEFAULT CHARACTER SET utf8 COLLATE utf8_unicode_ci;

mysql> GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON moodle.* to 'root'@'localhost' IDENTIFIED BY 'yourpassword';

mysql> FLUSH PRIVILEGES;

mysql> quit

Lets navigate to /var/www/html/moodle and now we can do it in 2 different ways but I would prefer just copying config-dist.php to config.php or you could php install.php
Please do search in config.php and modify the place which are marked in RED below

# cd /var/www/html/moodle

# cp config-dist.php config.php

# vim config.php

=========================================================================

// 1. DATABASE SETUP

//=========================================================================

// First, you need to configure the database where all Moodle data //

// will be stored. This database must already have been created //

// and a username/password created to access it. //
$CFG->dbtype = 'mysqli'; // 'pgsql', 'mysqli', 'mssql', 'sqlsrv' or 'oci'

$CFG->dblibrary = 'native'; // 'native' only at the moment

$CFG->dbhost = 'localhost'; // eg 'localhost' or 'db.isp.com' or IP

$CFG->dbname = 'moodle'; // database name, eg moodle

$CFG->dbuser = 'root'; // your database username

$CFG->dbpass = 'xxxxxx'; // your database password

$CFG->prefix = 'mdl_'; // prefix to use for all table names

$CFG->dataroot = '/var/www/moodledata';
$CFG->wwwroot = 'http://localhost/moodle';

Once you have finished modifying /var/www/html/moodle/config.php. I am pretty sure everything is now ready to roll but lets fix permission before we browse and check it.

# chown -R root:apache /var/www/html/moodle

# chmod -R 770 /var/www/html/moodle

Now open your favorite browser and type in http://localhost/moodle, I am sure you should be seeing
But in case you get "403 Forbidden Error", then try setting SELinux to permissive mode or Disable it