Title: Moodle Configuration
Course: Establish and maintain an LMS > Section: 06 - Moodle Configuration

Now that our webserver is running and the Moodle files are on the right folder and with the right privileges, let’s run Moodle!

To do that, open your browser and go to http://localhost or http://127.0.0.1 both addresses direct the browser to the local machine. Alternatively, if you already have a URL directed to that machine, you can use that.

Check that the configuration is similar to the image below.

For my configuration, I’m accessing using the http://localhost address, so that is what Moodle identified.

The moodle directory is C:\inetpub\wwwroot and the data directory is c:\inetpub\moodledata

If you see something wrong, please correct it.

Press “Next” to to go the next step.

Select MariaDB as the database and click Next.

Make sure that your database configuration is the same as in the image below.

For “Database password” enter the password you set up for your database.

Click Next to go to the next screen.

You should now see the screen below. Click “Continue”.

The next screen shows all the dependencies and modules that Moodle needs for running correctly.

As you can see in the image below, there is a yellow warning saying the website is not being accessed as https. This is not a problem for the moment but it is something we will try to fix later.

All the other lines should have a green “OK” on the right like in the picture below.

Press “Continue”.

Now it’s time to create your administrator account.

The default Username for the administrator account is admin. You can leave it like this.

For the Password, add a personal password, as this is your own admin password.

Later on you can add more people to Moodle and also give them administrator rights.

Add your email as well and, If you want, change the “First name” and “Surname” fields.

Now change your City, Country and Timezone. This will make Moodle display the time correctly.

Now roll the page down and press “Update Profile”

Now for the name of the website add:

Full site name: EENSAT Learning Management System Mirror at ‘your university’

For Short name: EENSAT LMS @ “Your University”

It should look like the image below:

Now adjust the settings for Location (select your own location), Disable Self Registration, set-up an email for your Moodle.to send emails from.

If you did not receive an email account to use in your Moodle installation, please provide one from your own University.

In the example, I’m adding a Gmail account eensat.itc@utwente.nl

Then click “Save Changes”.

Now you are in Moodle!

Configuring an email in Moodle

Now that your Moodle installation is running, let’s change the email configuration so that our users can receive updates from the Moodle platform and can reset their passwords when needed.

First go to the Site Administrator link.

Now click on the tab “Server”

And click in “Outgoing mail configuration”.

This is the page where you can set up you email.

For this guide, we will see how to set up a Gmail account for use with Moodle.

Create a new Gmail account and login. In your Gmail page click the configuration icon and then in Settings like in the picture below:

Go to “Forwarding and POP/IMAP

Select “Enable IMAP”

In your email configuration in Moodle, add the SMTP host as smtp.google.com:465

And in “SMTP Security” choose “SSL”

Roll down for more options.

In “SMTP Auth Type”, choose LOGIN

In “username”, add the Gmail email address.

In “password”, the password provided.

“SMTP Session limit” should be set to 1.

The “No-reply address” can be the same email.

Now click in “Save Changes”.

You should see a message saying that the changes were saved:

Now roll down and click in “Test outgoing mail configuration”.

Add your own personal email to the box and click in “Send a test message”.

In the screen below you can see that the message was sent without problems.

In the Gmail account, I can navigate to the “Sent” folder and check the message I just sent.

If I click on the message I can read it there.

In my personal email I can see that I received the same message:

Changing the web address for Moodle

If you set up Moodle from http://localserver or http://127.0.0.1 you will have to later on change the URL configuration manually.

To do that you must open Notepad, then click “File” and “Open:”

Once you save the file, Moodle will be configured to use this URL as the access route.

Extra note on the web address configuration.

It might be sometimes necessary to access Moodle from multiple different addresses.

If you need to do that, you should change the config.php file and change the address line to this:

$CFG->wwwroot = 'http://'.$_SERVER["HTTP_HOST"];

Please be cautious with this setting as it should only be used for testing and while configuring. Moodle might malfunction if you leave this on and yo should in no way us this in a production environment.

Concluding remarks

You should have now a fully functioning Moodle installation with access from the Internet.

You should notice that at the moment the server does not have encryption, so any data travelling between the server ad the end user is not safe. Moodle works better using encryption so you should follow the guide about installing TLS/SSL to make sure your server safer.