Howard Miller

You can use it if you want. But you're using an installer that was not provided by "Moodle". So we don't know what it's doing. That makes it really difficult to help here if/when things go wrong. Having said that, your host or Softaculous may provide help (Softaculous seem to be pretty good in that respect).

We'd love you to use Moodle and we'd be delighted to help you do so

 

Did you read... Installing_Moodle ?

 

While it's almost impossible to cover every eventuality... it does try to cover most of the major pitfalls. In particular...

 

"IMPORTANT: While there are now a number of places you can get the Moodle code (including host provided Moodle installers), you are strongly advised to only obtain Moodle from moodle.org. If you run into problems it will be a great deal easier to support you."

 

I know it's "do as I say, not as I do" but this is why reading the instructions through for something relatively complex like Moodle isn't the worst idea. 

Which version of Moodle?

Which version of PHP?

You can do whatever you like when exposing web services in a local plugin. BUT... externallib.php is now old school.

Have you read...

https://moodledev.io/docs/4.4/apis/subsystems/availability

https://moodledev.io/docs/4.5/apis/subsystems/external/writing-a-service

That's almost certainly the PHP version. I suspect that the code is being executed by PHP 8.3.8 (certainly >=8.0). Which would account for that error. I don't know why, unfortunately.

 

I should probably also mention that Moodle 3.9 is out of support by several months.