Why is moodle not available?

Question

I configured moodle but I'm getting an error message:

Fatal error: $CFG->dataroot is not configured properly, directory does not exist or is not accessible! Exiting.

My moodle directory is in var/www/html/moodle and in my moodle/config.php is $CFG->dataroot = '/var/moodledata';

Still nothing works when I try to start moodle. What can be done about it?

Answer 1

I think the moodledata folder does not have write permission. provide 0777 permission to the folder then it should be accessible.

Answer 2

Moodle does need to create and delete files within its working folder. If the folder owner is Apache, then you actually only need 700 permissions and can ignore the group. Otherwise you have to set 770 permissions to all directories in moodledata and 660 to all files in moodledata folder.

The critical thing is to make sure that the moodledata folder is NOT in any web accessible area (http root). If your http root is /var/www/html, then make it /var/moodledata.

Answer 3

You should first create that directory and give access to the user that run the web server to this directory. on centos/redhat:

chown apache.apache /var/moodledata

Note that on centos/redhat there is a good chance that SELINUX is blocking the web server process to access /var/moodledata directory. The easy way to check it is to disable it (temporarily) by typing:

setenforce 0
service httpd restart

Then if in this way it works - set it to allow access to this directory and the re-enable it in this way:

setenforce 1

if you want to disable selinux completely, then edit /etc/selinux/config and set this line:

SELINUX=disabled

on debian/ubuntu the ownership should be like this:

chown www-data.www-data /var/moodledata