Installing AMP
Moodle is written in a scripting language called PHP and stores most of its data in a database. The recommendrd 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. These packages can be tricky to set up for average computer users, so 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.
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: Red Hat Linux installation
Windows
The easiest way to do this is use one of the complete intall packages available from the Downloads page at Moodle.org. [1]
Alternatively, use a package like EasyPHP that bundles all the software you need into a single Windows application. Note that the EasyPHP 1.7 uses the following somewhat older versions:
- apache 1.3.27 (currnet relases is 2.2.0)
- php 4.3.3 (current stable release is 5.1.3)
- mysql 4.0.15 (current release is 5.0.18)
- phpmyadmin 2.5.3
It should be noted that these are not the current releases. Also many menus for EasyPHP are still in French. Here are the steps from start to finish for this approach: Windows installation.
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.
