General help

Yes, this is relatively simple, but is exacting. Get it wrong and it goes haywire spectacularly. Using the config.php file in the Moodle root, ther eis a setting that looks something like:

$CFG->dataroot  = 'http:\\yoursite\path\to\moodledata'; 

Aim that to the common moodledata directory and that will allow you to use the same moodledata directory.You can do the same with the database as well. You can adapt the following settings to what you need. 

$CFG->dbtype    = 'pgsql';      // 'pgsql', 'mariadb', 'mysqli', 'mssql', 'sqlsrv' or 'oci'

$CFG->dblibrary = 'native';     // 'native' only at the moment

$CFG->dbhost    = '192.168.1.110';  // eg 'localhost' or 'db.isp.com' or IP

$CFG->dbname    = 'thismoodle';     // database name, eg moodle

$CFG->dbuser    = 'admin';   // your database username

$CFG->dbpass    = 'password';   // your database password

Set one up then copy that config.php file to whatever location you need it. Tweak it where needed, but if the addresses are all absolute, it shouldn't need much. 

I think you will have very bad, unexpected, and unknowable results if you use the same dataroot for multiple different Moodle sites. Each Moodle site would try to makes changes to the dataroot files, breaking the other Moodle sites, and corrupting the status of Moodle's internal file repository. 

Maybe I am mis-understanding you though. You say you want to use the same Moodledata files, which leads me to believe you are talking about the path defined in "dataroot" described above. If this is what you are talking about (as opposed to just the Moodle code) then this is not something you will want to do.

Jamie

Nate,

It is clear you have 4 separate stores and you want to keep them separate.  What isn't clear is how Moodle is being used by each store.  Do you have one Moodle Admin that handles all courses and user accounts? 

If so, you could make use of some of the built in features of Moodle to manually enroll users into courses using groups to keep them separate.  We have been using this type of technique since Moodle 1.9 for a client and it works quite well.  In the newer versions of Moodle there are some additional ways of accomplishing the same thing.

If not, and each Store will be managing their own users and courses, it is best to use separate databases and moodle dataroot folders.  You could possibly use one database and make use of the feature of setting a unique prefex for each store that will create it's own set of tables in the database.  The downside to this approach, from my understanding, is performance of the database.

The approach's that have been discussed in these forums and used for multi-tenancy are:

1. You can create four different installs on one server as long as you setup virtual hosts for each store so the web server knows which site to load.  The downside is you have four different moodle installs to update and more space requirements.
2. I can't find the forum post right now, but someone spelled out how to use one install of Moodle and make use of some dynamic code in the config.php file that would look at the URL and automatically set the database and moodle wwwroot and dataroot locations.  The downside is that you have only one version of the database for all instances which at some point might not be ideal if there is a pluing that one instance uses and isn't compatible with the new version.

In terms of performance, I am not sure which approach will give you the best performance.  If anyone knows, I would like to hear about it.

Ron