Installing Moodle Guide on Debian Based Linux

Moodle Brief Introduction

Moodle is one of the most popular learning management system (LMS) that provides online learning services. Student’s read materials, conduct discussions, submit assignments, and attempt quizzes from outside the class and on the other side, teachers can provide materials, grade, evaluation, and other forms of management. Moodle does not necessarily have to replace traditional face to face learning but can be blended to make tradional learning more convenient just as implemented on the Universities that I graduated from which are Udayana University and Kumamoto University.

As technology advances, online and distant learning is no longer exclusive to big institutions with specialized technicians. Today, everybody can try and install Moodle in their computers and experiment their own local computer based learning. No special skill is needed but just some experience working with servers and web based applications. In fact, we do not need those skills since the installation guide is available here. For now, the Moodle installation here is in Ubuntu Linux as it is the most popular operating system (OS) for servers for general users. If you have not install Ubuntu or other Debian based Linux, you can follow my previous guide or wait for my future guide in Windows.

Installing The Server

Before anything else, make sure the Debian Linux is updated by entering the following command in terminal:

sudo apt update && sudo apt full-upgrade

There are three main packages needed to install the server:

1. Web Server (Apache2 is used here)
2. Database Server (MySQL is used here)
3. PHP language packages

Use any web server and database server you want. Here Apache2 and MySQL is used because they are the most popular among general users. The following packages are enough for Moodle installation today:

sudo apt install apache2 mysql-server php php-mysql php-xml php-curl php-zip php-gd php-mbstring php-xmlrpc php-soap php-intl

If the packages above are not found then ask your OS’s community for similar packages for example maybe php-mysql does no work but php7.0-mysql does. If you do not like using command line then bear with me with just one command line to install a graphical user interface (GUI) package manager…