Networking prerequisites and security

Moodle networking requires a number of additional components, that deal with secure communication and safe data exchange, to be installed on your servers.

Required PHP extensions

The following elements have to be installed on all Moodle servers that are participating in the network:

• curl: A PHP library of calls that are specifically designed to safely fetch data from remote sites. If not installed, you will have to recompile PHP and add --with curl when running configure script.

• openssl: Another PHP library that provides encryption functionality without the need to purchase an SSL certificate (--with openssl).

• xmlrpc: A PHP library that supports remote procedure calls via XML (--with xmlrpc).

  It is possible to add trusted hosts to Moodle, which allows them to execute calls via XML-RPC to any part of the Moodle API (Networking | XML-RPC hosts). This is potentially very dangerous and is only meant for developers. In this book, we will not be dealing...