installing moosh to make your life easier
If your site is crashed you need to edit moodle on the command line.
Enter Moosh, the moodle shell.
To install moosh, do this:
sudo apt-add-repository ppa:zabuch/ppa
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install moosh
Then, if you want to use moosh, you can use more or less any command shown in the web interface using a syntax of
moosh -n the-command the-parameters
for example
cd /var/www/moodle/
moosh -n plugin-uninstall someplugin
or
moosh -n cache-clear
note the "cd" part - it won't work unless you do that, as it uses the config file in that directory to login.
The -n part means do not ask me about my user id. Normally moodle operates as apache (www-data). Using -n lets you run it as root. Otherwise you have to do something which is in my view, worse, namely enable bash shell for apache. That opens you up to hackers, in my view, as apache is facing the web and accepts uploads on many apps such as wordpress, so it's feasible for someone to hack your server entirely if you give apache a shell.