Configuring user authentication

Authentication is the process of getting access to a system. Moodle supports a significant number of authentication types. Furthermore, Moodle supports multi-authentication, that is, concurrent authentication from different authentication sources. For example, your organization might use an LDAP server containing user information for all your staff, and OAuth2 for students, but it wishes to manage part-time users locally.

In the second half of this chapter, we will explore user authentication and the overall management of authentication plugins before covering common authentication settings. Then, we will deal with all authentication methods, which have been grouped into four categories: internal, external, provider, and system.

Exploring user authentication

Remember the basic authentication workflow we looked at in Chapter 3, Exploring Courses, Users, and Roles. Now, we can have a look at a more complete picture, as shown in the following diagram...