Moodle is run from a web server. You upload or place Moodle in your directory on the server. Usually, the server is someone's computer. If you're a teacher, or are in the corporate world, your institution might have their own web server. If you're an individual or have a small business, you will probably buy web-hosting services from another company. In either case, we are assuming that you have an account on a web server that offers Apache, PHP, and MySQL.

If you must install your own Apache web server and MySQL software, the easiest way to do so is to use another open source tool — XAMPP from http://www.apachefriends.org. Apache Friends is a non-profit project to promote the Apache web server. XAMPP is an easy, all-in-one installer that installs Apache, MySQL, PHP, and Perl. It is available for Linux, Windows, Mac, and Solaris. If you would like to create a test environment for Moodle, then installing XAMPP onto your computer will install the web server...

A subdomain is a Web address that exists under your web address, and acts like an independent site. For example, my website is www.williamrice.com. This is a standard website, not a Moodle site. I could have a subdomain, http://www.moodle.williamrice.com, to hold a Moodle site. This subdomain would be like an independent site. However, it exists on the same server, under the same account, and they both count towards the disk space and the bandwidth that I use.

In this example, Moodle is installed in the subdomain http://www.moodle.williamrice.com.

Using a subdomain offers me several advantages. Having a site to test updates and add-ons may be helpful if uninterrupted service is important to you. Later, you'll see how easy it is to copy a Moodle installation to a different location, change a few settings, and have it work. If you want to do this, make sure the hosting service you choose allows subdomains.

If you want to keep things simpler, you...

Get Moodle from the official website, http://www.moodle.org/. Go to the Download Moodle page and select the version and format that you need.

When you run the Moodle install script, the installer asks you to specify a directory in which to store the course material. This is the Moodle data directory. It holds material that is uploaded to the courses. You will need to have this directory created before you run the install script. That is what you will do in this step.

For security, the Moodle data directory should be outside the main Moodle directory. For example, suppose you are creating a learning site called www.williamrice.com/learn. You will install Moodle into /learn, and create the Moodle data directory somewhere outside of /learn.

Preferably, you will put the data directory somewhere that is not accessible over the Web. For example, on my hosting service, anything put into the directory /public_html is served over the Web. Anything outside of that directory cannot be seen over the Web as shown in the following screenshot:

You should check with your hosting service's technical...

While the Moodle data directory stores files uploaded by students and some larger files, the Moodle database stores most of the information in your Moodle site. By default, the installer uses the database name moodle and the username moodleuser. Using these default settings gives any hacker a head start on breaking your site. When creating your database, change these to something less common. At least make the hackers guess the name of your database and the database username.

You should also choose a strong password for the Moodle database user. The following are some recommendations for strong passwords:

You will need to create the Moodle database and the database user before you...