Installing AMP

AMP or AMPPlite stands for Apache, MySQL & PHP. Moodle is written in a scripting language called PHP and stores most of its data in a database. The recommended database is MySQL. Before installing Moodle you must have a working PHP installation and a working database to turn your computer into a functional web server platform. XAMP is a Windows and MAMP is a Mac OS version. Moodle does have Complete install packages in the download section as well as the Moodle only package.

The AMP individual applications can be tricky to set up for average computer users. This page has been written to try to make this process as simple as possible for different platforms.

Hosting Service

Unfortunately hosting services vary quite a lot in the way they work. Some will even install Moodle for you.

Most will offer a web-based control panel to control your site, create databases and set up cron. Some may also offer terminal access via ssh, so that you can use the command shell to do things.

You should work your way through the Installation guide and take each step at a time. Ask your hosting provider if you get stuck.

Mac OS X

The easiest way to do this is use the Apache server that Apple provides, and add PHP and MySQL using Marc Liyanage's packages. Both of the pages below come with good instructions that we won't duplicate here:

• PHP: Download from here: http://www.entropy.ch/software/macosx/php/
• MySQL: Download here: http://www.entropy.ch/software/macosx/mysql/

Once these are installed the standard Installation guide should be fairly straightforward.

Go here for a Step-by-step Guide for Installing Moodle on Mac OS X 10.4 Client (not server) Mac.

Red Hat Linux

You should install all available RPM packages for Apache, PHP and MySQL. One package that people frequently forget is the php-mysql package which is necessary for PHP to talk to MySQL.

Once these are installed the standard Installation guide should be fairly straightforward.

A more detailed walkthrough is here: RedHat Linux installation

Windows

For those who want to install Moodle for the first time on a localhost (a stand alone computer, a very useful tool even if you have a web based Moodle Server), here is a step by step, that works on a Window XP computer:

1. In the Download section, find the second group called "Complete Install Packages (Moodle+Apache+MySQL+PHP)" and choose the version you would like. Click on the download link on the far right, which will download a large zip file.
2. Unzip the downloaded file at c: and keep the path structure for all the files.
3. Rename the just created c:\moodle to c:\xampplite .
4. The following steps assume that the web server will be able to use port 80 on your computer. This might be a problem if you are running Skype which also likes to use this port as a default. Therefore you should quit Skype before continuing with this installation. Later, when the apache web server is running you can restart Skype which will then automatically use another available port.
5. In Windows Explorer click on c:\xampplite\apache_start to start the Apache web server. This opens a new window that you should leave open.
6. In Windows Explorer click on c:\xampplite\mysql_start to start the MySQL database server. This opens yet another new window that you should leave open.
7. In your favorite Web browser, go to address bar and type "localhost" and press enter or go.
8. This will start the Moodle Install process, which the Installing Moodle MoodleDoc page and Installing_Moodle#Go_to_the_admin_page_to_continue_configuration section describes in a little bit more detail. This can take some time for a new user. Don't panic, you can change things later and the install process will tell you what you absolutely have to fill in or correct.

In order to make starting Moodle more convenient in the future you could install the web server and database server as Windows services that are started automatically when you start Windows. To do this you have to run the program c:/xampplite/service.exe. To do this go to Start -> Run... and type the command "c:/xampplite/service.exe -install" into the Open: field. Then click OK.

Instead of using this package you can also install XAMPP and Moodle separately as explained on the page Windows_installation_using_XAMPP.

As an alternative to the above package you could use a package like EasyPHP that bundles all the software you need into a single Windows application. Note that the EasyPHP 1.8 uses older versions of the software that are too old for Moodle 1.6. Also many menus for EasyPHP are still in French. EasyPHP may be a good option again once its version 2.0 is released.

Here you can find steps for an IIS: Windows installation for XAMPP or Windows 2003 .

Testing PHP

Once you have installed your web server and PHP you should be able to create a file (for example phpinfo.php in the document root) with the following in it:

  <?phpinfo()?>

You should be able to open this file in a web browser by going to to the URL localhost/phpinfo and see a web page that has PHP status information in it such as this.

See also

• Installing Moodle
• Installation FAQ
• Upgrading Moodle
• Debian GNU/Linux installation
• Complete install packages, also includes instructions for creating a stand alone (localhost) installation on a single computer.