Making a new moodle instance

Once you have installed Moodle and have it working, you might need to make new instances for new organisations. That is, you might not want to share your first instance (copy) with other organisations, but you might get asked to nonetheless do so. The easiest way around this is to make a copy of a working copy of Moodle. 

I find Moodle is a bit easy to destabilise/break with plugins or changes, hence, it is also best just to take a backup copy anyway.

By default, Moodle consists of three main parts. The app, the database, and the varying/variable data or caches.

Caches and variable data are usually in /var/www/moodledata

The app itself is usually in /var/www/html/moodle

The database is usually in mysql or similar.

Once you have it installed and working, I'd suggest immediately making a backup copy to use for creating instances later on. I'd suggest doing it straight away because it is quite quick to climb up to 1 GB or larger which takes ages to process.

To make the backup, once it is working and you know the admin password, etc., do this:

mkdir /var/www/moodle_template

cp -dpRufv /var/www/moodledata  /var/www/template/moodledata_template

cp -dpRufv /var/www/html/moodle  /var/www/template/moodle_app_template

mysqldump -u root -p"mysqlpassword" moodle > /var/www/html/moodle  /var/www/template/template.sql

Thereafter, every time you want to make a new instance, just run a script. I suggest the following script. You probably will want to edit it.

First, edit the moodle config file in /var/www/moodle_template/moodleapp/ ... replace the domain name (yours) with a bunch of Xes like shown in the script below. 


After that, this script should just work.

#!/bin/sh


if [ -z "$1" ] ; then

echo "Please give a name for the new instance of moodle"

echo "please limit it to about 10-12 letters max"

echo "please do not use spaces or other non-letter characters in it"

exit;

fi


newinstance=$1

echo "Creating instance of moodle called: "$newinstance


cd /var/www/


echo "Copying template app to moodle app folder: "$newinstance

time cp -R template/moodle_app_template/ html/$newinstance

chown -R www-data:www-data html/$newinstance

chmod -R 777 html/$newinstance

echo "Copy completed"

echo


echo "Copying template data to moodle data folder: "$newinstance

time cp -R template/moodledata_template/  ./moodledata_$newinstance

chown -R www-data:www-data ./moodledata_$newinstance

chmod -R 777 ./moodledata_$newinstance

echo "Copy completed"

echo


echo "Creating moodle database for: "$newinstance

echo "CREATE DATABASE IF NOT EXISTS $newinstance CHARACTER SET utf8 COLLATE utf8_unicode_ci;" > $newinstance.sql

mysql < $newinstance.sql

echo "Step completed"

echo


echo "now granting privileges"

echo "grant all on $newinstance.* to 'moodle'@'localhost';" > $newinstance.sql

echo "flush privileges;" >> $newinstance.sql

mysql < $newinstance.sql

echo "Step completed"

echo


echo "Now loading the template database for moodle app; This step might take 7 minutes" 

time mysql $newinstance < template/template.sql


echo "Now erasing unneeded users"

echo "use $newinstance" > $newinstance.sql

echo "delete from $newinstance.mdl_user " >> $newinstance.sql

echo 'where (username not like "%pule%" and username not like "%admin%" and username not like "%sechaba%" and username n

ot like "%aadminn2%");' >> $newinstance.sql

echo 'exit;' >> $newinstance.sql

mysql < $newinstance.sql

echo "Step completed"

echo


rm $newinstance.sql # delete the temp SQL file


echo "Configuring the moodle to use the database called:"$newinstance

cp /var/www/template/moodle_app_template/config.php  /var/www/html/$newinstance/config.php 

cat /var/www/html/$newinstance/config.php | sed -e s/xxxxxx/$newinstance/g > /var/www/html/$newinstance/config2.php

mv /var/www/html/$newinstance/config.php /var/www/html/$newinstance/config_orig.php

mv /var/www/html/$newinstance/config2.php /var/www/html/$newinstance/config.php


echo "All tasks completed, please go to http://"`hostname`"/"$newinstance/" to test"




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