Installation in a Mac OS X environment

MAMP is a free distribution that contains Apache, MySQL, and PHP for Mac OS X. Like its Windows counterpart, the Moodle distributions for Mac OS X (10.4 or higher) are only intended for local installations and not for production environments. There is also a link on the download site for Mac server installation.

Moodle4Mac is available as universal binaries in XAMPP and MAMP versions, which are located at download.moodle.org/macosx. The XAMPP version has a smaller footprint and uses the new innoDB engine, but requires an additional installation step. The choice seems to come down to personal preference.

Once downloaded, follow these steps:

1. 1. Double-click on the downloaded DMG file to start the installation. This will open a screen as follows, which explains the remainder of the installation process.

2. 2. Drag the XAMPP or MAMP folder on this screen onto the Applications icon which will copy the Moodle system and its required components.

3. 3. Open the XAMPP or MAMP folder in Applications where you will find the following relevant icons:

4. 4. This step only applies to the XAMPP installation. Double-click on the FixRightsForMoodle.sh icon, wait until a terminal has opened, enter you Mac admin password and close the terminal when the script has completed.

5. 5. Double-click on the XAMPP or MAMP icon to start Apache and MySQL. There is also a MAMP Control Widget in the same directory, which you might want to install.

6. 6. Double-click on the Link to Moodle icon, which opens your Moodle instance on your localhost in your default web browser.

And that's it! An installation cannot be easier than that! You don't even have to go through the installation process. Moodle is already pre-configured and you are ready to go.

The default password for the admin account is 12345, which you should change in the user profile.

The MAMP folder also includes a shell script called UpdateMoodle20.sh (requires CVS to be installed see the Updating Moodle section discussed later). When you double-click on the file, the script will be executed to download the latest version of Moodle and install it on your Mac. On all other operating systems, you will have to go through a more cumbersome update process which will be described further.