Howard Miller

I would use web services in preference to updating the database directly. If there are web service functions in existence which do what you want. You might also want to look at Moosh https://moosh-online.com/.

Failing that... you *can* update the database directly but you first need to understand the database. It's grown organically over around 20 years and the consequence of that is that it doesn't always make a great deal of sense. 

The other issue you face is that Moodle relies heavily on its cache API. So changing the database doesn't always have an immediate effect on the front-end. So - executive summary - except in exceptional (one off) circumstances, I would definitely avoid updating the database from outside Moodle on a "business as usual" basis.

 

You can also consider writing your own plugin that works with Moodle's built-in APIs directly. It's reasonably straightforward for a plugin to publish its own Web service functions if that might help.

Ahh... ok. I see what you mean now.

Yeh - that's definitely a downside. I've ended up with five nginx instances all on different ports with a reverse proxy in front. It might just be me, but reverse proxies are one of those things that I always find confusing to set up.

I'm much the same, except I'd be interested if you could expand on "The network layer should be based on internal networks for security concerns, so the use of a reverse proxy (haproxy i.e.) should be hardly considered" a bit more?

The only thing I'm going to say is.... is there a particular reason why you are using Bitnami? Evidence suggests that it doesn't end well.

Once again - these Moodle packages are (effectively) unsupportable here as we have no idea how they have put together Moodle.

With my (late to the party) moderator hat on...

I'm just politely noting that (almost) everybody in these forums are ordinary Moodle users of one kind or another, not paid support staff. Even if we were paid support staff, I wouldn't be happy about "can you simply answer my questions". Everybody here is trying to make a helpful contribution to the notorious "will this work for some huge number of users?" question. I certainly see no "bad attitude". Be nice