This is essentially a linux box in the cloud but at the time of writing I did not like to add it to the Linux category, it seems more general than that somehow. If this install lacks detail or doesn't work then see comments attached to this page. I start this off with some assumptions and then go though a full install using the cli. The assumptions are that you have an Amazon 32 bit EC2 Linux server setup and you have ssh & http access to it.

Install all the requirements

From the cli as root or sudo

yum install httpd
yum install mysql-server 
yum install git
yum install php
yum install php-gd 
yum install php-pear
yum install php-mbstring
yum install php-mcrypt 
yum install php-mbstring 
yum install memcached 
yum install php-mcrypt 
yum install php-zts 
yum install php-xmlrpc 
yum install php-soap 
yum install php-intl 
yum install php-zip 
yum install php-zts
yum install php-xml

To ensure that mysql and httpd come up on boot.

chkconfig mysqld on 
chkconfig httpd on

To ensure that utf8 is used by mysql

edit /etc/my.cnf to read as follows

[mysqld]
default-character-set=utf8
default-collation=utf8_unicode_ci
character-set-server=utf8
collation-server=utf8_unicode_ci
datadir=/var/lib/mysql
socket=/var/lib/mysql/mysql.sock
user=mysql
# Disabling symbolic-links is recommended to prevent assorted security risks
symbolic-links=0
[mysqld_safe]
log-error=/var/log/mysqld.log
pid-file=/var/run/mysqld/mysqld.pid
[client]
default-character-set=utf8

In order to make sure php is included when httpd comes up

make sure you have a file called /etc/httpd/conf.d/php.conf whose contents are like the following

<IfModule prefork.c>
LoadModule php5_module modules/libphp5.so
</IfModule> <IfModule worker.c>
LoadModule php5_module modules/libphp5-zts.so
</IfModule>
AddHandler php5-script .php AddType text/html .php
DirectoryIndex index.php

At the time of writing 26-01-2012) (php-common should provide zip.zo but it doesn't so I have put a copy here (http://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=194589) Attached to a forum post. Perhaps a wiki buff could fix that better.

Once you have got zip.so, put it in /usr/lib/php/modules

Also you need to add

extension=zip.so

to your php.ini (in /etc)

Create the database, database user and access rights

run

mysql_secure_installation

Answer all the questions conservatively. (e.g. You will not need test databases or for root to have any other mysql access than local.) This will create a root mysql pw for you. Mysql users are nothing whatsoever to do with you unix users.

run

 mysql -u root -p
<password you set above>

In mysql you need to

1. make a database. The name can be anything you like. I used moodledb

2. make a database user. The name can be anything you like. I used moodledbuser.

3. give that user rights to access the database from the localhost.

4. No db access is required by anyone from any other host than the localhost

- Now you are in mysql and all the commands are mysql commands and could equally be run on a windows instance of mysql. Do not forget the ";" after each command.

create database moodledb;
grant all privileges on moodledb.* to moodledbuser@localhost identified by '<put a pw here>';
quit

TEST the above by doing

mysql -u moodledbuser -p
<password>

If you get connected OK then you can go on and quit.

Create moodledata folder

mkdir /var/www/moodledata

The default root folder for apache is /var/www/html and so moodledata is not accessible from the web.

chown apache:apache /var/www/moodledata

Fetch and do permissions on moodle

cd /var/www/html
git clone git://git.moodle.org/moodle.git

This should put all of moodle in a file called moodle in the correct folder /var/www/html. It takes a while but you get %age feedback.

There are more sophisticated git commands, see git docs in moodle docs for more info.

chown -R apache:apache ./moodle

Do the install

Visit http://<your amazon host>/moodle

Well, it worked for me!

Documentation

Amazon EC2 Cloud Services Installation

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