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

221. First steps with Moodle (the .deb version) in Debian

This is a very brief, very basic outline.

Looking online the general recommendation seems to be to install moodle yourself and avoid the debian package version. While not a stranger to rolling my own, I just want to play with moodle for learning purposes because that's what my uni uses.

Anyway, do
sudo apt-get install moodle

Once it's installed, look at
ls /etc/apache2/sites-enabled

If there's nothing moodly, then do
sudo cp /etc/moodle/apache2.conf /etc/apache2/sites-enabled/moodle.conf
sudo service apache2 restart

Navigate to http://localhost/moodle

The actual installation takes ages, so go get yourself a cup of tea/coffee to prevent your mouse finger from getting itchy. In other words, just wait until you get a list showing that all steps have completed and that you may continue.

You need to allow cookies.

Fill out the admin stuff - country, password, city etc etc.

At this point you can log in, create a class and start exploring. Have fun.