Deploying moodle

[taowang]

Hi I am new to Cloudron. I want to deploy a Moodle site. I am wondering if the upgrade approach that cloudron uses will delete all the themes and plugins.

[girish]

@taowang it will preserve the themes and plugins across updates. This is the way it is for all the apps on Cloudron. But of course, moodle is a beast and quite a special one. See the note in https://docs.cloudron.io/apps/moodle/#updates

[taowang]

Thanks for the reply.
What is the best practice for upgrade? This is my reasoning:

1. Disable automatic upgrade and wait until the latest version of all plugins (including themes) become available. If upgrading moodle before plugins, the old plugins might break the site.
2. Create a backup of the entire site (clone). Upgrade each plugin. Test the site.
3. If everything works, then upgrade moodle. If the site breaks, restore with the backup.
4. Put moodle into maintainence mode when upgrading plugins and site.

Am I right? Anything else we should watch for?

[taowang]

This post is deleted!

[taowang]

One more quesion: I saw two folders and two files in the File Manager

• moodle
• moodledata
• .initialized
• .php.ini

The Backup Documentation says "Only the database and app user data is backed up."

I am wondering where in the File Manager can I find the database. I want to see if it is mysql or mariadb.

[nebulon]

The databases are running as services on the platform in Cloudron. This is unrelated to the filemanager, which shows only what /app/data within that app's container has.

Databases need specical code to create proper backups for restore, but that is done alongside the backup of mentioned /app/data.

[nebulon]

Forgot to mention. moodle on Cloudron uses Postgresql

[girish]

I have put some info on the moodle fs layout at https://docs.cloudron.io/apps/moodle/#file-structure

[taowang]

That's great! PostgreSQL seems more robust than Mariadb.

I am new to Moodel. I tried Coolify and Caprover. They are using the Bitnami image which is extremely hard to upgrade. It doesn't pull the latest image.

And just today, I followed the official moodle installation tutorial. Honestly, it is quite complicated, especially for a non-technical educator.

Cloudron is probably the only platform that achieves the balance between the simplicity of the one click installation approach and the sustainability of the official installation approach.

I will dive deeper into Cloudron in the following weeks. And I will share my feedback with you guys.

Awesome work!

[taowang]

@girish Hi Girish. I am wondering if the automated backup is disabled? I saw a message in the Automatic Backup Setup within moodle that says "Setting executable and local paths disabled in config.php". So I am wondering if this is disabled by default since we have auto backup for the entire data at Cloudron dashboard ready.

[girish]

@taowang yes, since we have cloudron backups (which are app level), we disable the backups inside the app.