To get the most out of this book

For Moodle, you must have the following components up and running on your server (at the time of writing for version 4.0):

• Database: MySQL (version 5.7 or later utilizing the ACID-compliant InnoDB storage engine), PostgreSQL 10+, MariaDB 10.2.29+, Aurora MySQL (on Amazon Web Services), Microsoft SQL Server 2017+, and Oracle 11.2+.
• Web server: Apache is the preferred web server option, but Moodle works well with any other web server that supports PHP, such as Microsoft IIS.
• PHP 7.3.0 is the minimum PHP version to run Moodle 4; PHP 7.4.0 is the minimum version from Moodle 4.1 onwards. PHP 8 is also supported.
• PHP extensions: Moodle makes use of a number of PHP extensions, most of which are compiled in PHP by default: curl, ctype, dom, fileinfo, gd, hash, iconv, intl, json, mbstring, openssl, pcre, simplexml, spl, xml, xmlreader, zip, and zlib.

Depending on your specific setup, additional software might be required.

If you don’t have access to the preceding components, ensure that you have full administrator access to a Moodle system. You won’t be able to carry out any system-level operations but will be able to administer Moodle via its web interface fully.