CentOS Linux installation
Installing Moodle 2.0 on stock version of CentOS 5.x is not that straightforward due to a limitations imposed by the software available in the default repositories.
So let us go step by step in configuring and installing Moodle 2.0 on CentOS 5.5.
Asumptions
- We have just a minimal OS installation
- PHP is not installed
- No RDBMS is installed
- Apache is not installed
- We plan on using MySQL as Moodle RDBMS
Requirements
As you may or may not know Moodle 2.0 requires following versions of software:
| Element | Version |
|---|---|
| PHP | 5.2.8 (5.3.3 or more recent recommended) |
| MySQL | 5.0.25 (5.5.x recommended) |
| Apache | 2.2.x (CentOS ships with 2.2.3) |
PHP
By default CentOS 5.5 ships with PHP 5.1.6. It is very old version and unsupported by Moodle 2. To avoid recompiling PHP I recommend use of certified PHP build -Zend Server 5.x Community Edition .
Before being able to download it you will need to register and login on the site which is free of charge. Site offers several options for installing the product and the one I recommend is the RPM installer.
You can find detailed description of this process here.
MySQL
MySQL is a good choice for Moodle RDBMS but it requires a bit more tackling to get adequate power. CentOS repositories ship with older version of MySQL (5.0.77 at the time of writing). It is highly recommended to install and use MySQL 5.5 using Oracle's official rpm packages.
Getting the packages
To do that go to MySQL 5.5. GA download page. Download the client utilities ( MySQL-client-5.5.x-x.rhel5.xxxx.rpm ) and MySQL Server (MySQL-server-5.5.x-x.rhel5.xxxx.rpm) package.
Installation
After that install the downloaded packages by executing this from command line:
rpm -ivh MySQL-*
Configuration
MySQL 5.5 does not install any configuration file by default so we need to create one
