645. Moodle on Debian

I want to play around with moodle on my own desktop so I can experiment before making any major commits to a course website.

I first had a look at https://docs.moodle.org/33/en/Installing_Moodle_on_Debian_based_distributions, but, realising that moodle is in sid, decided to build my own .deb package.

This was done on debian jessie (8.9), which has at this point been overtaken by stretch as stable. I'm thus three releases behind sid.

1. Add the sid /src/ repo to sources.list
deb-src http://ftp.au.debian.org/debian/ sid main non-free contrib

2. Get source and build
I don't know exactly what dependencies you'll need. Error messages will tell you.

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install build-essential dpkg-dev mysql-server mysql-client php5-xmlrpc php5-intl
sudo service mysql start
mkdir ~/tmp/moodle -p
cd ~/tmp/moodle
sudo apt-get source moodle

Edit debian/control (necessary if you're on Jessie/8.9 -- newer debian versions may not need this):

14 Depends: ${misc:Depends},
 15  php5, php5-mysql | php5-pgsql, php5-gd, php5-curl, php5-cli,
 16  apache2 | httpd, ucf, postgresql-client | default-mysql-client | virtual-mysql-client,
 17  dbconfig-common, libphp-phpmailer, libphp-adodb, php-htmlpurifier, php-tcpdf,
 18  php-cas (>= 1.3.3-1), libjs-jquery-migrate-1
 19 Pre-Depends: debconf (>= 0.5) | debconf-2.0

Then continue in the terminal:

cd ~/tmp/moodle-2.7.19+dfsg
sudo dpkg-buildpackage -us -uc
cd ..
sudo dpkg -i moodle_2.7.19+dfsg-2_all.deb
sudo apt-get -f install
sudo cp /etc/moodle/apache.conf /etc/apache2/sites-available/moodle.conf
sudo ln -s /etc/apache2/sites-available/moodle.conf /etc/apache2/sites-enabled/moodle.conf
sudo chmod o+r /etc/apache2/sites-available/moodle.conf
sudo chmod go+w /var/lib/moodle
sudo service apache2 reload

Navigate to http://localhost/moodle and follow the prompts