Web services in Moodle

First of all, you will have to activate web services, which takes place in Advanced features | Enable web services. Next, you will have to enable the Web services authentication plugin (Plugins | Authentication | Manage authentication). Once this has been done, go to Plugins | Web services | Overview, which acts as a dashboard for setting up Moodle web services:

Note

Enabling web services comes with a potential security risk as you are granting access to Moodle to outside users and systems. The mantra should always be to open up as little services and functions as possible.

Moodle supports two ways of connecting to external entities via web services:

• External systems controlling Moodle

• Users controlling Moodle

Two checklists are shown, one for each approach. As you can see in the following screenshot, the first two steps are identical. We have already enabled web services and also have to enable protocols. Moodle supports four web services protocols: SOAP, REST, XML...