Introduction

Moodle is a free and open source learning management system (LMS) used widely throughout the online education domain. Its functionality allows for a number of different ways to deliver quality educational resources over the browser. Since the application is open source, you’re able to fully customize the functionality and feel of your Moodle website and stack additional modules on top of the platform. Stack Harbor has made it simple for you to get a skeleton Moodle application built with our turnkey Stacks. We’ll show you how to get started and how to access your application once its built.

Accessing Your Application

Once your Stack is built, you can access your Moodle application by pointing your browser to your public IP address. You will be shown the default homepage for a successful Moodle installation. Your application has been configured with some defaults upon installation such as the name of the site (which is set to your hostname). In order to change these settings, you will have to login to the administrative dashboard which requires SSH access to your Stack. If you don’t know how to SSH into your virtual machine, check out our detailed tutorial.

Once you’ve gained SSH access to your virtual machine, pay attention to the information that is logged to your terminal upon login. This is called the message of the day (MOTD) and contains a lot of sensitive information pertaining to your Moodle installation. We highly recommend you take note of all the credentials echoed here and run rm -f /etc/motd which will remove the message of the day permanently. Be sure you note down the passwords before you run the command or your passwords will be lost forever!

The first set of credentials you see in the MOTD contain the username and password for the administrative interface for Moodle. On the homepage of your Moodle application, there is a ‘Log In’ button in the top right of the screen which directs you to the login portal for the admin dashboard. Enter the first set of credentials echoed in the MOTD and you’ll gain access to the administrative interface.

Final Words

Congratulations! You’re ready to begin adding courses, content, and styling to your Moodle site and deliver quality online education! There is a variety of information on Moodle available on the web. Check out the Moodle documentation for more information on the platform. From all of us at Stack Harbor, ahoy!