Test course generator

If you want a sample course for load testing or reliability of a feature (where its behaviour might depend on the size of a course), you can generate standardized test courses using the generator tool at Administration > Site administration > Development > Make a test course.,

Warning: This tool is for developer use only! Courses created using this feature can occupy a large amount of database and consume disk space (tens of gigabytes). Although you can delete those courses (and wait for various cleanup runs) to release the space they consumed, this tool should not be used on a live site. For safety it is disabled unless you set Site administration > Development > Debugging: Debug messages to DEVELOPER.

Using the tool

1. First set the debugging level to DEVELOPER as mentioned in the warning above.
2. If you want to set a password for all the generated users, add the line "$CFG->tool_generator_users_password = 'YOURSECRET';" to config.php of Moodle. If the password does not comply with the site security policy to set "$CFG->passwordpolicy = 0;" too.

GUI version

1. Visit Administration > Site administration > Development > Make a test course.

Options

• Size of course: You can choose amoung XS, S, M, L, XL, or XXL (required). The table below shows their difference.

Please note that bigger courses take longer to be created - the biggest up to 4 hours on a decent server. Your server may run out of space or time out if it can't handle the size you selected.

Size of course	Approx. size	No. of assignments	No. of pages	No. of small files	No. of big files	No. of sections	No. of users	No. of forum posts	Approx. time to create
XS	10 kB	1	1	1	1	1	1	2	1 sec
S	10 MB	10	50	64	2	10	100	20	30 sec
M	100 MB	100	200	128	5	100	1,000	500	2 min
L	1 GB	500	1,000	1,024	10	500	10,000	5,000	30 min
XL	10 GB	1,000	5,000	16,384	10	1,000	50,000	10,000	2 hours
XXL	20 GB	2,000	10,000	32,768	10	2,000	100,000	20,000	4 hours

• Short name: The course short name (required)
• Course full name and description (optional)

Sample output

 Creating course
 Creating [Course name]
 Creating assignments (100): . . . . . . . . . . . . done (12.7s)
 Creating pages (200): . . done (1.5s)
 Creating small files (128): done (0.4s)
 Creating big files (5): . done (1.3s)
 Checking user accounts (1000)
 Creating user accounts (1 - 1000): . . . . . . . . done (8.7s)
 Enrolling users into course (1000): . . . . . . done (5.7s)
 Creating forum (500 posts): . . done (1.7s)
 Course completed (32.2s)

CLI version

You can run the tool from the command-line using:

php admin/tool/generator/cli/maketestcourse.php

This will show command-line options.

Options

In addition to the options in the GUI version the CLI command has the following options:

• Use a fixed dataset: Use a fixed data set instead of randomly generated data, useful for generating a standard data set
• Specify a file size limit: Limits the size of the generated files to the specified number of bytes, you may find this setting useful because depending on the size you select the courses can use too much disk space
• By pass check: Bypasses the developer-mode check
• Quiet: Do not show any output

File:make-a-test-course.png