Moodle with OpenLiteSpeed Server - Setup Steps

Re: Moodle with OpenLiteSpeed Server - Setup Steps

by Jon-Erik Lido -
Number of replies: 0
Having freshly gone through the process of moving Moodle to OpenLiteSpeed, I have a few items to add to your documentation, specifically with regards to Linux installs. Hopefully this benefits others. In this example I assume a Debian/Ubuntu style system, which uses apt for package management.

By default in Linux OpenLiteSpeed will be set up to run as user "nobody". Since we need Moodle to be able to write to moodledata, it needs a proper user and group. For me this has always been the standard www-data user and group. However, OpenLiteSpeed needs to be reinstalled when changing the user and group. Here are my steps:
  • stop lsws: systemctl stop lsws
  • change user and group in /etc/local/lsws/conf/httpd_config.conf to www-data
  • remove the lsws temp directory: rm -rf /tmp/lshttpd
  • apt-get -y install --reinstall openlitespeed

Further, make sure you install the lightspeed php curl and intl packages. I'm using php8.2:

  • apt install lssphp82-curl lsphp82-intl

You also need to edit usr/local/lsws/lsphp82/etc/php/8.2/litespeed/php.ini and increase max_input_vars to Moodle's minimum (of 5000) or greater. While I was there I also uncommented extension=curl and extension=intl. I'm not sure if that was necessary or not.

It wasn't entirely clear to me at first where to put the "moodle" and "moodledata" directories with the way lsws handles VirtualHosts. I ended up going with:

  • Virtual Host Name (VH_NAME) as my fully qualified host name (moodle.mysite.edu, etc)
  • Virtual Host Root (VH_ROOT) set to $SERVER_ROOT/$VH_NAME
  • and my Document Root set to $VH_ROOT/moodle/

I then put moodledata in $VN_ROOT/moodledata/ 

And I'll confirm Aadi's suspicions about cron: Using OpenLiteSpeed's version of php works perfectly fine in the crontab for me.

Finally, I specified my SSL certificates in the SSL tab. Putting them in the https Listener's SSL section resulted in getting an SSL warning periodically when I use the lsws web admin, which generates it's on certs. I haven't had time to resolve that issue yet, but perhaps the answer is to put them in the VirtualHost's SSL section instead? Maybe someone else can enlighten us.



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